AT&T announces multi-gigabit fiber: $110 a month for 2Gbps, $180 for 5Gbps | Hacker News Reader

AT&T announces multi-gigabit fiber: $110 a month for 2Gbps, $180 for 5Gbps

arstechnica.com

17 pointsksec18 comments

I came here to make a joke about how quickly you'd blow through your data cap, but the article says:

AT&T's announcement said its new fiber plans have "no equipment fees, no annual contract, no data caps, and no price increase at 12 months."

I wonder if this is actually true, or if it's "unlimited, unless you (in our opinion) abuse it". If you uploaded and downloaded 1.5 PB per month, every month, would AT&T really not say a word?

I have an "unlimited" mobile data plan from AT&T, but if I use too much data (after I downloaded a couple of games and after Apple Music decided to burn through 10GB of data for reasons unknown) then they send me a message that says although it is "unlimited" they are going to limit it anyway.

I have 'unlimited' 1gbps from AT&T and have only run into 'inconsistent performance' after about a Terabyte a month. The issues were significant enough that I won't be upgrading further.

This is 2Gbps and 5Gbps symmetrical Internet speeds, offering same bandwidth in upload and download. Which is different the common case of G-PON. Although it does include a WiFi 6 ONT / Router and HBO Max, still expensive though.

I used to see all HN members from US complaining about how poor the ISP in US are, but I am surprised to see this announcement. Especially quote

>AT&T fiber is available at about 17.5 million locations now. The company has said it will add 3 million to 5 million new fiber locations per year over the next few years.

This doesn't seems too bad? The expansion rate in the next 5 years seems decent. I am guessing a lot of people complain because they live in houses and not flats? Which is much more expensive to lay fibre and hence the slow expansion. Or are these figures marketing / made up numbers?

While I have no use for Muti-Gig Internet ( I actually downgraded from 1Gbps to 300Mbps ), I do hope they take off only to push 2.5Gbps / 5Gbps or even better 10Gbps as standard. Driving down the cost of those ports!

>The expansion rate in the next 5 years seems decent.

I'm super skeptical about their expansion plans. Using the FCC's broadband map[1], I took a look at coverage around my neighborhood in Mountain View, CA. If AT&T fiber available to one household in a census block, its marked as "having AT&T fiber".

My block was marked as having fiber, but my house is not eligible for fiber according to AT&T's website. I started typing in other addresses in my block into AT&T's website and exactly one house was eligible out of the 20 addresses in my census block. I checked the four census blocks adjacent to me, and it was the same story, except for one block which had three eligible households.

Based on this it seems like their current strategy is to get into as many census blocks as possible to please the FCC while providing as little coverage as possible.

[1] - https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov

The router they provided me for my 1gbps service is buggy as hell. It also, at times, introduced significant latency, probably because the NAT tables were too small. As soon as I noticed this I bypassed their provided router by spoofing its MAC on my own router.

Note, there is no 'legit' way to use your own router as they do authentication of their router with the ONT.

I’ve had AT&T’s gig service in Austin Texas in a couple of locations over the years. It’s a good service, fast and reliable. My only gripe is that it’s peering is either over subscribed or capped. I would typically see uploads stall at a fraction of the total pipe while uploading to a data center over Ethernet.

Google Fiber has been a better experience. It doesn’t test as fast on Speedtest, but real life uploads are easily twice as fast.

Those prices are crazy! I can get 2Gbps for around 60$ in central europe. Network upgrades planned for July will raise that to 10-25Gbps for the same cost, depending on region.

That said, I've also spent 100$ on 500Mb in the next town over.

I'm happy to see more ISPs offering multi-gig. Hopefully the prices will come down as availability increases.

You're not in Latvia or Switzerland are you?

A friend of mine managed to get 350Mbs symmetric fiber for $40/month. It seems to be actually delivering those speeds. He's going to wait a while before fulling committing to it, and canceling Comcast, of course.

I'd rather pay $25/mo for 25Mb symmetrical with low latency.

Now I have 20Mbit down/1Mbit up with Spectrum. I'm grandfathered on the Time Warner "Everyday Low Price" plan. I downgraded from 50Mbit service with TWC down to ELP, which at the time was 3Mbit down/1Mbit up, because I got sick to death of having to renegotiate my rate every single fucking year. And the last time, they raised my rate to $65/mo, I had to call 3 times, each time they said they'd give me a discount, that lasted a month, then it went back up. I just got fed up completely with it and told them "You can either give it to me for $45/mo (a $5/mo discount from what I was paying), or put me on ELP for $15/mo." So the dinglenuts put me on ELP, then started sending me all kinds of offers for 50Mbit service for $40/mo! I was so mad and so sick of talking to them, I wouldn't bite. And you know what? 3/1 service wasn't so bad. Streaming TV at 720p worked fine. Uploads sucked, but I only do that occasionally when uploading a new version of HashBackup.

Now AT&T put fiber on my street and I get offers all the time for $35/mo (big letters), but with about 2" of fine print at the bottom: $10/mo for equipment plus taxes = $50/mo. This is for 300Mbit symmetric. $50 is not a bad deal, but then I'm going to be back on the "$5-10 more a year price increase" plan. I really don't want to renegotiate my bill every year.

I did write AT&T a letter, saying "You already know what I want, because you emphasize it in large print: $35/mo. But then have 2 inches of fine print at the bottom with what you know I don't want. If you eliminate the fine print, I'd buy it." Duh!

With the duopoly we have in the US for both TV and Internet service, the only way to have reasonable costs is to switch every year to the other provider and get the new customer discount. They just rely on people being too lazy to do that, and for it to be too much hassle. If everyone did do that, the providers would probably realize that all the annual truck rolls are costing them too much money and they'd scale back their price increases. It's too bad there's no way to organize consumers into collective action.

...available in 2040 in select cities (2)

I have their 1gbps service. It is great. That said, it is massive overkill.

I've had 10gbps, it was overkill but fun to see the network do its thing.

I think wifi is a major bottleneck to up-selling to these plans. google fiber tried to sell me the 2Gbs service from current 1Gbps, but most of my devices on wifi with throughput around 240Mbps on a good day.

I think your access point is the bottleneck, not WiFi.

Technically both, since WiFi can only do half it's rated speed due to duplexing, but it's reaching points where it is almost at interface limits.

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