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AT&T Communications The Internet

AT&T Gigabit Internet Coming To 11 More US Regions (pcmag.com) 64

Posted by msmash from the aggressive-expansion dept.
AT&T is bringing its gigabit Internet service to 11 new metro areas. Currently available in parts of 29 cities around the country, the ultra-fast network -- which the company is now calling AT&T Fiber -- is expected to reach another 45 locations by the end of this year, reads a PCMag article. From the report: That includes 11 new markets: Florida: Gainesville and Panama City, Georgia: Columbus, Kentucky: Central Kentucky, Louisiana: Lafayette, Mississippi: Biloxi-Gulfport and Northeast Mississippi, Tennessee: Southeastern Tennessee and Knoxville, and Texas: Corpus Christi.
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AT&T Gigabit Internet Coming To 11 More US Regions More

AT&T Gigabit Internet Coming To 11 More US Regions

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  • Data cap in 3.7 seconds! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is great... I'll be able to exceed the data cap before I am even able to unplug my device!

    • no cap if you get DTV (it's really our rain fade back up / VOD plan)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stdarg ( 456557 )

      There's no data cap.

      • there is a data cap unless you also subscribe to a shitty TV service.

        • You are eligible for unlimited home Internet data if you have a combined bill for Internet and TV services, you purchase the up to 1Gbps speed tier, or you purchase the unlimited data usage option.

          Source: AT&T Terms [att.com]

          • Also, they bumped the cap to 1TB for everyone else (except for one really low-end DSL tier that I'm not sure is even in most markets).

        • Re:Data cap in 3.7 seconds! (Score:4, Informative)

          by Archvile7 ( 964553 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @05:30PM (#53028311)
          No, not anymore - they removed it. I have AT&T Gigapower and no TV or phone service. It DID have a 1TB cap but they removed it a month ago. Also, this past week, they announced they are ending the "Internet Preferences" campaign - the deal that would scan your internet traffic and serve ads based on it. Before, you had to pay an additional $30 to not be subjected to the traffic monitoring; now, they are removing it entirely. So, I am paying a flat $70 a month (no taxes on fiber internet in TN for some reason) for unlimited gigabit speed with no traffic monitoring or ad serving.

          • No, not anymore - they removed it. I have AT&T Gigapower and no TV or phone service. It DID have a 1TB cap but they removed it a month ago. Also, this past week, they announced they are ending the "Internet Preferences" campaign - the deal that would scan your internet traffic and serve ads based on it. Before, you had to pay an additional $30 to not be subjected to the traffic monitoring; now, they are removing it entirely. So, I am paying a flat $70 a month (no taxes on fiber internet in TN for some reason) for unlimited gigabit speed with no traffic monitoring or ad serving.

            I live in Montreal, and we have Bell Canada Fibr . We've had it for three years. Why did it take AT&T so long to offer the same package(s).
            I can download a 4 gig file in about a rate of 6kbytes per second. We also don't seem to have a data cap. That "no cap" feature allows me to enjoy my hobby which is to download and test many new Linux ISO files.

            • Why did it take AT&T so long to offer the same package(s).

              U.S. ISPs, that's why. I consider myself extremely lucky to have this service because very, very few people have access to Fiber much less at this price point.

  • abusive monopoly (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lead Butthead ( 321013 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @02:35PM (#53027147) Journal

    AT&T and big cables does nothing to upgrade their infrastructure until competitors appear, then they stall them through their paid politicians. If their competitors persists, they deploy their subpar upgrades and undercut the pricing of their competitors. If their competitors withdraws from the area, they jack up their pricing and screw over the consumer. If this isn't abuse of monopoly power, I don't know what is.

    • Re:abusive monopoly (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Arkham ( 10779 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @02:54PM (#53027303)

      AT&T and big cables does nothing to upgrade their infrastructure until competitors appear, then they stall them through their paid politicians. If their competitors persists, they deploy their subpar upgrades and undercut the pricing of their competitors. If their competitors withdraws from the area, they jack up their pricing and screw over the consumer. If this isn't abuse of monopoly power, I don't know what is.

      I don't know about that. Google fiber is technically in "Atlanta", but I live 40 miles north. There will likely NEVER be google fiber where I live, but I get Gigabit AT&T for $70/month. They ran the lines through our entire neighborhood last summer. I am sure it cost a lot to get it enabled, but because they're 20x faster than what I had before (Charter 60 Mbps) they're getting a lot of customers to help them recoup the cost.

    • Re:abusive monopoly (Score:4, Informative)

      by charon69 ( 458608 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @04:03PM (#53027749)

      As of this past Monday, I have a 1GigE Fiber line into the house from AT&T. It's been available in my neighborhood for about 2 weeks.

      The tech was extremely nice. He worked with me on where the ONT would be installed outside the house. Ended up with the AT&T-provided router sitting on an upper-shelf in the pantry. Quite convenient.

      AT&T wouldn't provide any additional installation services inside the house, though. So I'm also pulling Cat6 throughout the house right now by myself.

      Also, the AT&T trencher that buried the fiber-line ended up cutting my Cable line... which was inconvenient, as the Cat6 hadn't finished being pulled yet, so I was using a hybrid setup depending on where in the house Ethernet had already been run. Had to use WiFi for Legion-gaming over the weekend. Bah!

      Install Tech actually gave me his cell number, and told me to call him directly if there were any issues rather than calling AT&T directly. Already hit him up once about a router-config-issue, and he answered immediately.

      Speed is good. I'm getting something like 600Mb down / 400Mb up on a crappy laptop hooked directly to the router. Not sure if the non-1GigE speed is a result of ONT-distance from the GPON head, limited processor/RAM on the laptop, or what... but, hey, it's a hell of a lot better than the 30Mb that I was getting from Wow (former Knology).

      And why do I have this line in my house right now? Because Google is coming in soon. AT&T just beat them to the punch. For that matter, Wow/Knology is supposed to have 1GigE service over coax in the area around the start of the new year. Everybody is racing to get 1GigE to the prem.

      Competition is nice when it actually works.

    • I would have to side with the Telco's for right now; the business case for gigabit to the home has only really been there in the past year. (Business case as in being able to recoup your investment.)

      You might have been able to get 10% penetration in a market two years ago at double the price, whereas today at that rate you are likely to get closer to 25%, and it is easy to envision a future where you can get 75% penetration.

      I think the real question is if we can survive with just two different ISPs in a ma

    • I am 40 miles away from Nashville and they put Gigapower in 5 or 6 neighborhoods where I am at. Google Fiber has no plans to come this far outside of Nashville, and probably never will. So, I don't think your statement is entirely accurate.

    • Lawsuits happened over 10 years ago in Lafayette, LA. AT&T and Cox Cable sued the city for installing their own fiber.

      http://lusfiber.com/ [lusfiber.com]

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... [arstechnica.com]

  • While I would love fiber, I'll choose satellite internet over anything from AT&T.

    • Re:AT&T though... (Score:5, Funny)

      by sims 2 ( 994794 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @03:13PM (#53027441)

      What's your problem with AT&T?
      We have a 12Mbps down 1Mbps up u-verse ADSL2+ line at work only took about 6 months and 15+ service calls and modifying the modem firmware so it didn't hijack the connection whenever the connection as lost for a couple seconds to get it to work.
      Other than that and the constant abusive sales calls from telemarketers hired by AT&T (They want to save us money by switching us to VoIP) It's been great.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheSync ( 5291 )

        Based on this graph [increasebr...peed.co.uk], your DSL local loop is likely about 2.5 km long.

        First, congratulations, your local loop is much shorter than the average 4.25 km local loop in the US!

        Now the bad news, it is unclear that any DSL over twisted pair is going to get faster over a 2.5km loop. Yes, VDSL or G.FAST would give you crazy speedups [telsoc.org] if your loop was 500m or shorter, but otherwise you are out of luck until they get that DSLAM closer to your house somehow.

  • As someone who has used AT&T Fiber and installed it for many people stay away it's a mess and they cripple upload data, not only do they throttle it, their pos modems get buffer over bloat, crash and they force you to use their dns. Tons of customers have issues with Google and open dns having "errors" within their network.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
      Please forgive my ignorance but whatstops you from bridging said pos modem en yousing your own router that does not have those probleme? Or is the overbuffering don on the l2 fiber interfacr ?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Modern AT&T equipment forbids bridging.

      • Like AC said they forbid real bridging on residential, they try to take over dns requests and I have them seen go as far as put ads on 404 requests, etc.. by legal injection on fiber. Depends on the city / state. On the business side they try to pull less, but still do some real bs on their side. Try to backup via a secure method to the cloud and you'll see them throttle real quick because they assume your torrenting....

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

      [citation needed]

      At least if you're talking about the SMB side and not the consumer side. I run a pair of PRIs and 50mbit service on this platform (which from their perspective is U-Verse, even though it's delivered over fiber) and the only problem I have is with service and support. It sucks. The biggest issue is that the support people see it in their systems as a U-Verse account, the IVR systems route you to U-Verse technicians when you call in, etc. If I didn't have an account team, it would be impo

  • Who cares? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If all they are going to do is spy on you.

    ATT = NSA/CIA asset

    • I think at a certain amount of data, it will be impractical for NSA to slurp up everything. You just need to keep a random noise generator going (so to speak) to poison the system. I would love to see a random noise TOR network for this purpose.

  • I don’t see a single metropolitan area liste (Score:4, Informative)

    by plague911 ( 1292006 ) on Thursday October 06, 2016 @02:49PM (#53027245)
    It is all well and good to bring fiber to rural communities but you got to at least be honest that you are not hitting cities yet.

    • Cities typically are not as under-served as rural communities. Inevitably it will be a leapfrog pattern for the time being.

  • I've been waiting for AT&T Gigapower to come to my neighborhood in the middle of a large city in the 2 years since it was announced. Yes, they have to string wires etc. But there seems to be more focus on announcements and less on actual availability.

    I have a dual-wan router split with AT&T and Comcast; the latter is faster, but goes down 2x/day. I'll pay for fiber -- come on, take my money!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There's a reason it's called "Fiber To The Press Release". Traditionally these announcements have come when they can provide service to one or two MDUs in an area. After that, they eventually roll it out to anyone that already has FTTH. Overbuilding fiber in neighborhoods that are served by copper is very rare and very slow to happen. Maybe one day, but if you're on copper and in one of these areas just announced, don't get too excited. It may still be many years (if ever) that you'll be able to get FT

  • I don't live in one of the states listed, but every time I see an article like this I have to suspect it's FTTM: "Fiber to the media". Grandiose announcements, followed by installing it in a few neighborhoods, calling it too expensive, then putting "the project on hold". Wait for competition, explain the project is once again resuming, sue some cities to ensure the monopoly, then place the project back on hold.
  • I just spent the last ten minutes crawling around AT&T's site looking for a concrete statement concerning available bandwidth, and came up empty. Their "Check Availability" page talks only about download speeds. Further, they are careful to say, "up to 1Gb/sec," which is code for, "You will not actually ever receive 1Gb/sec."

    I can't find any page that discusses upload speeds, which are almost certainly crap.

    Meanwhile, Google Fiber (if you're lucky enough to get it) starts at 1Gb/sec symmetric.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ewhac ( 5844 )

      I can't find any page that discusses upload speeds, which are almost certainly crap.

      Oops, I take it back. [att.net] They're claiming up to 1Gb/sec upload speeds as well.

    • Meanwhile, Google Fiber (if you're lucky enough to get it) starts at 1Gb/sec symmetric.

      MMMmmm... No. Google fiber starts at 100Mb/s for the basic service. And caps at 1GB/s for the upgraded service.

      My Reference:
      http://fiber.google.com/ [google.com]

    • I pull 900 down and 800 up hardline into my modem. So, whatever...I'll take that over 60/4 offered by Charter any day of the week.

    • Why would you even bother waisting your time checking on them. With the data caps it became perfectly clear that they don't give a rat's ass about the customer.

  • Seriously.

    The only people this benefits is people out in the boonies with no other choices but dialup, which is also AT&T.

    Everyone who actually has a choice runs, screaming, from AT&T and their world-class crappy service.

  • OK, AT&T lies. It says it's available in Los Angeles.

    I live within the city limits of Los Angeles, and the most that AT&T will offer me is 45Mbps.

  • I wonder if it will be available in Silicon Valley any time before the twenty-SECOND century.

    You'd think they'd string Silicon Valley early. But historically they seem to leave it for last.

    Maybe it's left over bad blood from the "bellheads vs. netheads" feud that led to the growth, and eventual takeover of networking, by packet-switched networks culminating in the Internet.

  • Are these new markets all South of the Mason-Dixon line because it'll soon be too cold to dig easily further North, or are there other reasons as well?

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