Google Beaten To The Punch by AT&T On Super-Fast Broadband

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Isn't competition a great thing? A little pressure from Google and now everyone is offering up gigabit service or lowering their prices. Well, not "everyone," but it is getting a lot better.

Google Fiber has yet to bring its super-fast broadband service to the city of Atlanta. But Comcast Corp. and AT&T Inc. know it’s coming, and they’re offering the 1 gigabit Internet speed Google promised -- and signing up new customers. It’s been six years since Google announced it would lay a fiber network to compete with cable providers and telephone companies. Although it’s now in only four markets, competitors are lowering rates and building faster lines to keep customers from defecting to the technology giant.
 
This news is obviously spun by marketing, because as a comcast business user I was informed that there is currently 600'ish homes in atlanta that can get comcast business gigabyte as of february 2016. It's a bunch of shit. So here I am paying $179 a month still for 100megs down and 25 megs up.
 
Real headline should read:

Hypocrite nickel and diming telcos afraid of losing more customers to Google attempt to get their shit together and offer a semblance of fair service for the price they charge.
 
Max speed I can get from ATT is 15/? fiber and the sales people that came by when they were first offering it couldn't even give me a the upload speed.

I can get about 4x the download speed from WoW! for about the same price ATT wants for their joke of a service.

Google fiber is supposed to be coming to my area next year.

Can't wait.
 
If only it would also spur them to create the infrastructure we need for rural broadband, hell rural connection at all. Haven't looked at the stats recently but I imagine it is still somewhere around 80% of people who can't get broadband/any internet access at all. I mean if you are a single person on top of a mountain that's one thing, but because you live a mile outside the nearest town that has access and that's too far? That is an unfunny joke right there, which sadly is the boat my parents are in.
 
So, AT&T wired my neighborhood for fiber in January, but you still can't order anything on the fiber :banghead:
 
Suddenlink just started offering gigabit speed in my area but the problem is the 550gb cap. Why would I pay for that kind of speed and have to worry about such a small cap. I'll stick with 200/20 with a 450gb cap @ $70.
 
the dark fiber, called that because it is fiber optic cables wrapped in dark colored plastic to prevent cross talk if it bends any, runs all numbered highways from one city to the next. It is really expensive to close off two lanes of i95 from Maine to Florida to run five more cables to increase the bandwidth. trenching is really expensive because you have to be safety rated to work in trench that is over your head but most utility lines that are not on poles are buried as deep as it financial feasible so someone does not plant a tree in their yard and break the cables when the roots grow enough to encounter the pipes holding the wires... the biggest reason they use roads like I95 is because it is federal high way and you have to get permission to mess with the road. The land to some distance on either side of it is federal land. I know they have trouble routing some cables because of limited access roads which are perfect for laying cables in the concrete which stabilized the payment but is on usually state owned land... with no guarantees that people will be blocked from growing trees too close to the highway. That is main truck that goes from one city to another... all the traffic goes along those lines, so when companies charge two or three hundred dollars to have fast path from one city to another as part of business internet they have to also feed all the traffic along those same cables... which means that they likely blame the last mile to avoid anyone asking how much traffic moves along those lines... really if we could figure out how to get people to not use I95 and the other numbered roads for six months and had given a grant to someone to turn how ever much sand into fiber optic cables and sunk maybe a thousand lines and I risk a dos statement here, then I'm guessing to would be much easy to have high speed networks from city to city increasing the bandwidth of the us connection by ten or even a hundred... though to pay for all of that construction the companies would likely want us all to pay it plus interest and charge the business customer ten times as much to keep their profit margins high to prevent the shareholder companies that read bloomberg's recommendations of what to buy and sell... while half of the mutual companies work for one of his corporations or corporations he holds voting stock in... trench digging is brutal work since you can not use a back hoe to get down to the existing cables without having to redo all the concrete as once the structure is weakened you risk having to reroute traffic via another path, while we have many paths messing up one slows down the rest... but if we could say get even more time some how and dig all the way down to the bedrock and make a controlled access tunnel with all the wiring you would have a major speed increase but a major issue with earthquake prone areas either not doing it for safety reasons or having to fix it every time they have a big earth quake, not that the existing wires don't get messed up but the more bandwidth we use the more we depend on it. so it really is something that some has to have the guts to try and figure out how not to destroy all the people that depend on tourism because if people have to wait in traffic on back roads they may simply stay at home for the time period... then places like Hawaii and Alaska only have the transpacific cable which is really expensive to upgrade... most of them depend on that and satellite for info down.
ya people likely will keep doing a little here and there and maybe get around to looking at the cause instead of what one company here or there can justify to their shareholders... humm cheap flights might help.
 
cyclone3d said:
Max speed I can get from ATT is 15/? fiber and the sales people that came by when they were first offering it couldn't even give me a the upload speed.

I can get about 4x the download speed from WoW! for about the same price ATT wants for their joke of a service.

Google fiber is supposed to be coming to my area next year.

Can't wait.
Click to expand...
AT&T doesn't upgrade their old copper lines that can't handle higher speeds. If you are in AT&T territory you basically have to move to a different neighborhood that offers the 75/8 mb plan.
 
Thanks to Google for scaring the crap out of AT&T, I've had AT&T Gigabit for over a year now. Do I thank AT&T? Hell no, they wouldn't have done it without Google forcing their hand...


5278615881.png


Read em and weep boys. :D
 
Steve said:
Isn't competition a great thing? A little pressure from Google and now everyone is offering up gigabit service or lowering their prices. Well, not "everyone," but it is getting a lot better.

Google Fiber has yet to bring its super-fast broadband service to the city of Atlanta. But Comcast Corp. and AT&T Inc. know it’s coming, and they’re offering the 1 gigabit Internet speed Google promised -- and signing up new customers. It’s been six years since Google announced it would lay a fiber network to compete with cable providers and telephone companies. Although it’s now in only four markets, competitors are lowering rates and building faster lines to keep customers from defecting to the technology giant.
Click to expand...
I live 4 miles from a small town in Kentucky. The town (Bedford) has broadband. I can't get it. I use exede satellite for internet access. No online gaming for me. data limited to 15gb per month. I live about 30miles from Louisville. They have Google fiber. Any idea when this might change? yeah I know, Kentucky... Oh by the way I called the local cable company and they said they would be happy to run the cable to my street for $8000
 
Really the only reason I want Google Fiber is to get rid of this damn cap Comcast has implemented. I don't need 1Gbps up and down but hey if it comes with no cap and I get to pay 10 bucks less I am all for it. The sooner I can ditch Comcast the better.
 
drakken said:
the dark fiber, called that because it is fiber optic cables wrapped in dark colored plastic to prevent cross talk if it bends any, runs all numbered highways from one city to the next. It is really expensive to close off two lanes of i95 from Maine to Florida to run five more cables to increase the bandwidth. trenching is really expensive because you have to be safety rated to work in trench that is over your head but most utility lines that are not on poles are buried as deep as it financial feasible so someone does not plant a tree in their yard and break the cables when the roots grow enough to encounter the pipes holding the wires... the biggest reason they use roads like I95 is because it is federal high way and you have to get permission to mess with the road. The land to some distance on either side of it is federal land. I know they have trouble routing some cables because of limited access roads which are perfect for laying cables in the concrete which stabilized the payment but is on usually state owned land... with no guarantees that people will be blocked from growing trees too close to the highway. That is main truck that goes from one city to another... all the traffic goes along those lines, so when companies charge two or three hundred dollars to have fast path from one city to another as part of business internet they have to also feed all the traffic along those same cables... which means that they likely blame the last mile to avoid anyone asking how much traffic moves along those lines... really if we could figure out how to get people to not use I95 and the other numbered roads for six months and had given a grant to someone to turn how ever much sand into fiber optic cables and sunk maybe a thousand lines and I risk a dos statement here, then I'm guessing to would be much easy to have high speed networks from city to city increasing the bandwidth of the us connection by ten or even a hundred... though to pay for all of that construction the companies would likely want us all to pay it plus interest and charge the business customer ten times as much to keep their profit margins high to prevent the shareholder companies that read bloomberg's recommendations of what to buy and sell... while half of the mutual companies work for one of his corporations or corporations he holds voting stock in... trench digging is brutal work since you can not use a back hoe to get down to the existing cables without having to redo all the concrete as once the structure is weakened you risk having to reroute traffic via another path, while we have many paths messing up one slows down the rest... but if we could say get even more time some how and dig all the way down to the bedrock and make a controlled access tunnel with all the wiring you would have a major speed increase but a major issue with earthquake prone areas either not doing it for safety reasons or having to fix it every time they have a big earth quake, not that the existing wires don't get messed up but the more bandwidth we use the more we depend on it. so it really is something that some has to have the guts to try and figure out how not to destroy all the people that depend on tourism because if people have to wait in traffic on back roads they may simply stay at home for the time period... then places like Hawaii and Alaska only have the transpacific cable which is really expensive to upgrade... most of them depend on that and satellite for info down.
ya people likely will keep doing a little here and there and maybe get around to looking at the cause instead of what one company here or there can justify to their shareholders... humm cheap flights might help.
Click to expand...

As soon as I seen your fucked up thought on what dark fiber is I stopped reading as either you are an idiot or taking trolling too far with that long of a post.
 
toast0 said:
So, AT&T wired my neighborhood for fiber in January, but you still can't order anything on the fiber :banghead:
Click to expand...
Yeah, same here, there are multiple Uverse boxes within 10 blocks of me (closest is less than 2 blocks away), and still the best they offer at my address is 6Mbps ADSL "Uverse" service. So I went with Comcast, who gives me 150Mbps (peaks around 180Mbps), and the scary thing with cable, is that it's not like the last mile infrastructure changed at all, yet they can just push this (or gigabit in some areas) whenever they feel the big "bad" Google monster moving in? Way to go dudes, just showing us you're purposefully holding back technology simply because you can get away with it.
 
As far as Google is concerned, this is still a win for them. They don't really care about being an ISP, what they really want is more people having faster internet viewing more google-owned advertising.
 
From what I heard even if Google was 20% more expensive people would still flock to them from Comcast (or any other "old" "ISP") without thinking twice ;)
 
John Kish said:
I live 4 miles from a small town in Kentucky. The town (Bedford) has broadband. I can't get it. I use exede satellite for internet access. No online gaming for me. data limited to 15gb per month. I live about 30miles from Louisville. They have Google fiber. Any idea when this might change? yeah I know, Kentucky... Oh by the way I called the local cable company and they said they would be happy to run the cable to my street for $8000
Click to expand...
Lucky. The cable company at a house I almost bought had broadband a mile from it and I was told "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to get it run that mile. I'd have been happy to pay $8k to get it run.
 
A charter salesman came to our little shop here in Northern Michigan, he boasted about charter speeds and lower cost bla bla, said he could get us switched over in the next few weeks. Thing is, this is northern michigan, and every thing moves at its own pace. So we opted to switch to charter, that was a year ago. Then we had a survey for the trenching, that was 2 months ago. As it turns out, Charter wants us, and the small industrial park to pay for the trenching. Nope! In northern michigan, if you want high speed, you go onto i75 highway. :)
 
Supposedly Comcast is offering their 2Gbps fiber and AT&T is offering 1Gbps fiber in the neighborhood I am moving to. Here's a fun rundown of each.

Comcast: 2Gbps up and down for $300/month, though apparently that goes down to $150 with a 3 year contract. $500 installation, $500 activation, and your connection is metered at 650GB (?!?!) unless you take the 3 year contract.

AT&T: 1Gbps up and down for like $80/month. The connection is metered at 500GB (?!?!) with overage charges per GB over that. Literally almost at the cap if you tap out the connection for a single hour.

Just gonna wait for Google or stick with Comcast cable since they don't enforce caps on that.
 
It is supposedly available in San Jose... I may have to ring them up!
 
Apparently fiber is having trouble gaining traction in my area because of the ants and high water table. This used to be part of the Everglades just 50 years ago.
 
DedEmbryonicCe11 said:
Of course.:pompous:
Click to expand...

I saw Sepultura play live at the South Park Meadowlands outside of Austin, Texas, in the summer of 1994, in the middle of a set opened by Prong (on tour for its excellent Cleansing album) and headlined by Pantera (promoting its very unlikely Billboard chart topper, Far Beyond Driven). Sepultura's newest album at the time was still Chaos A.D.
 
I got at&t fiber to my house, but I'm sticking with timewarner (charter) for now because it's 320mbps and no cap. If AT&T dropped their cap and didn't packet inspect everything I would switch over, but I do not care for their business practices. Also who in the hell can see benefits in 1gbps vs 320mbps. If you are hogging the upload speed I could see it, but my vpn at work caps my upload speed at around 10mbps. So I'm sticking with cap free for now. AT&T would also help win me over if they offered a modem to buy instead of tacking on another monthly fee for rental. F U at&t.

Anyhow, it's nice to have options. I suspect google will make it's way to the outskirts of austin eventually and I'll have 3 possible ISPs. It's unfortunate for people who only have 1 option.
 
So all Google has to do is announce they are expanding Google Fiber to whatever city to get Comcast and AT&T to do their work for them? That's awesome.
 
Exavior said:
As soon as I seen your fucked up thought on what dark fiber is I stopped reading as either you are an idiot or taking trolling too far with that long of a post.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Dark Fiber is a term used for Fiber that is currently not being used. "Dark" as in no light signal. There is approx. several 1000 miles of dark fiber currently in the USA that was laid back in the late 90's to early 2000, but it is not being used by the telco because they do not want to spend the additial money to bring it online and deliver it to local area's while they can rape us to death on their 50+ year old copper lines.
 
Aionic Duck said:
Supposedly Comcast is offering their 2Gbps fiber and AT&T is offering 1Gbps fiber in the neighborhood I am moving to. Here's a fun rundown of each.

Comcast: 2Gbps up and down for $300/month, though apparently that goes down to $150 with a 3 year contract. $500 installation, $500 activation, and your connection is metered at 650GB (?!?!) unless you take the 3 year contract.

AT&T: 1Gbps up and down for like $80/month. The connection is metered at 500GB (?!?!) with overage charges per GB over that. Literally almost at the cap if you tap out the connection for a single hour.

Just gonna wait for Google or stick with Comcast cable since they don't enforce caps on that.
Click to expand...
2Gbps in a residential neighborhood? 650GB cap? $1000 in fees?

What the hell. I'm all for faster speeds, but unless you have 10GbE hardware in your home (expensive) I don't see how you can utilize that. I feel like they are just "offering" that service to be able to claim they have the fastest internet in town (or something to that effect) without intending anyone to take them up on it because it's such a bad deal. Well I suppose $150/mo isn't bad for 2Gbps, but it is when you have a data cap like that.
 
Killerxp100 said:
Suddenlink just started offering gigabit speed in my area but the problem is the 550gb cap. Why would I pay for that kind of speed and have to worry about such a small cap. I'll stick with 200/20 with a 450gb cap @ $70.
Click to expand...
I just upgraded for the 100/10 package to the 200/20 package from suddenlink and it says the 200mb has an unlimited cap.
 
trentchau said:
This news is obviously spun by marketing, because as a comcast business user I was informed that there is currently 600'ish homes in atlanta that can get comcast business gigabyte as of february 2016. It's a bunch of shit. So here I am paying $179 a month still for 100megs down and 25 megs up.
Click to expand...


I blame it on living in a conservative state that gives Comcast a bigger leash, note most of the test markets for Comcasts data caps are in conservative states
 
SGTGimpy said:
Exactly. Dark Fiber is a term used for Fiber that is currently not being used. "Dark" as in no light signal. There is approx. several 1000 miles of dark fiber currently in the USA that was laid back in the late 90's to early 2000, but it is not being used by the telco because they do not want to spend the additial money to bring it online and deliver it to local area's while they can rape us to death on their 50+ year old copper lines.
Click to expand...

True there probably is miles upon miles of dark fiber but if there wasn't then whoever put it into the ground is retarded. If you need 6 fiber put in 48 or 92. Doesn't cost you much more to put in larger counts then it is there when you need it later. I have equipment being feed with 4 fibers but have dark fiber there for future use if I need it. So just having dark fiber doesn't mean people are refusing to use it. Just means that people have fiber in the ground for future needs or to lease out.

Shameless Liar said:
2Gbps in a residential neighborhood? 650GB cap? $1000 in fees?

What the hell. I'm all for faster speeds, but unless you have 10GbE hardware in your home (expensive) I don't see how you can utilize that. I feel like they are just "offering" that service to be able to claim they have the fastest internet in town (or something to that effect) without intending anyone to take them up on it because it's such a bad deal. Well I suppose $150/mo isn't bad for 2Gbps, but it is when you have a data cap like that.
Click to expand...

And this is why you don't see fiber spreading faster. Companies don't want to shell out all the money to get customers fiber out of their own pockets and people are willing to pay toward the cost. We spent about $1100 - $1400 per house that we convert from DSL to fiber to the home just in the cost of man hours, fiber and electronics. So $1000 in fees would allow us to get that money back. We don't charge people like that in most places, but I could understand why some would. We have one customer that requested fiber to 5 locations, requires 15 miles of fiber be put in to reach them all. I can tell you that isn't a cheap install.
 
Aionic Duck said:
Supposedly Comcast is offering their 2Gbps fiber and AT&T is offering 1Gbps fiber in the neighborhood I am moving to. Here's a fun rundown of each.

Comcast: 2Gbps up and down for $300/month, though apparently that goes down to $150 with a 3 year contract. $500 installation, $500 activation, and your connection is metered at 650GB (?!?!) unless you take the 3 year contract.

AT&T: 1Gbps up and down for like $80/month. The connection is metered at 500GB (?!?!) with overage charges per GB over that. Literally almost at the cap if you tap out the connection for a single hour.

Just gonna wait for Google or stick with Comcast cable since they don't enforce caps on that.
Click to expand...

Comcast claims to offer that down here too, I tried to look into it but you have to basically already have a comcast fiber near by for them to even pretend to think about installing it... and comcast does not have a lot of fiber running around, just some for their metro-ethernet stuff and their network... but the rest of their plant is still coax
 
nvgrim said:
I just upgraded for the 100/10 package to the 200/20 package from suddenlink and it says the 200mb has an unlimited cap.
Click to expand...

Funny enough I just got an email today explaining their new data cap, 200/20 and up now gets unlimited data for $5 extra. Guess I'm back to watching high quality Netflix :p.
 
btw, anyone who chooses verizon/comcast/att over google fiber is a fool, I don't care if they offered 5gbps connectivity for the same price as googles 1gbps speeds, the speed is useless if all they give a damn about is the speed of connection on their own INTRAnet. I want to access the outside world without problems, and that means making sure the interconnects are constantly upgraded and not oversubscribed, that when companies like netflix want to place their own streaming servers closer to a home network so that less data has to travel as far the ISP allows that. It's more than just the top end speed.

I STILL get throttling on youtube sometimes, what a god damn joke.
 
300 Mbps DL, 100 UP -- 7 $ / month
1 Gbps DL, 200 UP -- 12 $ / month

Beat this!

I live in Romania though. The downside is that you only get those speeds in the big cities. In the countryside, the 300 Mbps download tends to be more like 20 for the same price. Which is still a lot better value than in the US and Western Europe.
 
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