AT&T says it won't build fiber home Internet in half of its wireline footprint | Hacker News Reader

AT&T says it won't build fiber home Internet in half of its wireline footprint

arstechnica.com

30 pointsLorenDB26 comments

Image if electricity or landline phones were invented today. Rural electrification would never have happened.

(Similarly, if the web browser was invented today, it would never have made it into an app store)

I know some people that are building a house in a rural area. Nearest electricity is less than a quarter mile away. PG&E quoted them $100,000 to bring in power. They're going solar.

and we’re all better off for it, including PG&E, who doesn’t have to transmission lines over more (un)maintained wilderness, which is where many of the fires come from in the first place.

AT&T won't even build fiber home internet where they've already got fiber. One of their fiber lines has been running under my driveway for years but they've never offered it at my address.

Yeah, this is also my experience.

AT&T won't even build fiber home internet to urban/suburban residents that have existing fiber-to-the-node (original U-Verse) service -- places less than a mile away from functional residential AT&T fiber drop already (DSLAM).

They're still happy to charge me the $100/month for that ~60mbps VDSL copper service though. (even though, if anything happens to that line, they're refusing to repair/replace it)

It's ridiculous.

AT&T actually end-of-life'd good ole fashioned DSL at my Dad's house. They don't offer any wired internet services there any longer.

Yep!

I just got back from visiting family out in the boonies. They have had fiber on their street for more than a decade. It runs right over their drive way and down a few more telephone poles to … the dslam. The dslam which is still v1 speeds and att won’t even sell new dsl service on it / is aggressively pushing old customers out.

They’ve been happy starlink users for a while now.

I've got fiber in the backyard from Spectrum and Google Fiber out in front of the house. Neither offer fiber service to me. Some contractor for Google comes out and spray paints new markings indicating I should have a tap placed every 6 months or so. Seasons come and seasons go, but the paint marks still keep getting refreshed.

Funny, AT&T says they couldn't offer fiber to my address at my old house, or the one I moved to across the street. Of course I can get Sonic fiber at both addresses...which uses...drumroll...AT&T's fiber infrastructure.

It pains me especially that this is the company that way back in the day gave us Claude Shannon, Richard Hamming, and the transistor.

I don't know why they want to get out of the copper business...after 2022 FTC change, copper lines increased like 10X in cost and the provider has literally no legal obligation to provide uptime guarantee/support, sounds like a telecom's wet dream!

The rural United States suffers another cut from the deregulatory knife. No grocer. No rail service. No bus service. No retail. No health care. And now no telecommunications. What’s next, electric?

It is possible to run internet connectivity over copper wires, so to say "no telecommunications" is catastrophizing.

This is the correct answer for now, but when currently available options are functionally equivalent to what dial-up is now I think this opinion will not have aged well.

The legacy copper wire infrastructure is gradually decaying and not being maintained or replaced. Telecommunications companies are no longer offering new DSL subscriptions in some areas. In a few more years the options in many places will be Starlink or nothing.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/why-v...

The rural electorate has voted overwhelmingly for candidates who oppose these regulations. This is apparently what they want.

Sure, but that makes the assumption that people vote rationally, or even in their self interest, when evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. And this isn't commentary on an individual party, either, or on intelligence: basically nobody is incentivized to honestly portray how a candidate might actually govern.

Sure, but that makes the assumption that people vote rationally, or even in their self interest

If they don't, then democracy is done. Right now, thanks to the EC, a rural vote is worth more than anyone else's. If you're right, then the rest of us had better find a way to disenfranchise them, and soon.

So... are you sure you're right?

I don't really want to comment on the merits of democracy, how to implement democracy, or how to measure how much democracy is being done. I'm just pointing out you can't read much from what people want from how they vote when what they actually want (or need) is basically absent from the conversation to begin with.

EDIT: Obviously I don't have solid data that what people want isn't discussed, but the general metabolism of US politics appears to be: newspapers, cable news, and podcasts raise an issue (which may or may not be relevant), and that's what politicians respond to. I typed a lot more illustrating how this is at best tangentially related to what people want to see change, but I'm not trying to rehash the communication dysfunction of this country.

https://www.washingtonpolicy.org/publications/detail/the-42-...

>In 2021, the Biden Administration passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which included a provision to give $42.5 billion to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program to provide under-served and rural areas with internet access. To date, it has connected nobody.

No wonder we are not voting for it, the government continually promises to connect people and does nothing.

The 42 billion could have bought every single rural American a Starlink terminal and had a bunch of money left over.

Is this a side effect of AT&T using cheaper passive optical networks for their current buildouts?

More that AT&T has to maintain or increase profits in an economic climate where people’s ability to spend is flat or decreasing, and so they’ve been steadily reducing their infrastructure investment rather than seeing their profits drop. Now that they can expect the FCC approvals necessary to kill last-mile service, they’re set for a few more years, and I expect their long-term goal is to become an exclusively wireless telco.

If AT&T wants out so bad, they should give their copper network away.

To whom? The legacy copper network probably has negative value at this point but AT&T is locked in by certain contracts and legal agreements (same for other legacy telcos). They would probably have to pay another company to take on those obligations.

ATTs own language is "not profitable enough" rather than "unprofitable".

I always figured the most valuable asset was the easements and conduit. If they don't want to cram fibre into it, give it to someone who will.

They'll do it.... if the government subsidizes it.

This is what AT&T would rather give its customers: “AT&T Phone Advanced”, which is just a bullshit telco grade LTE VoIP adapter.

https://www.attconnects.com/meet-the-next-gen-home-phone-ser...

They’ve been selling it/hawking it at their business customers for a bit now. It’s made by Dataremote.

https://www.business.att.com/content/dam/attbusiness/briefs/...

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