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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Why, it's a clear message to the public as well, which states: AT&T is only ready to improve their service when threatened with competition. Otherwise forget it. At least one has to give them a credit that they had guts to admit it.

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Yep.

"This expanded investment is not expected to materially alter AT&T’s anticipated 2013 capital expenditures."

So, they've had the capability for a while now. They just didn't see any reason to bother with the hassle of deploying a newer technology when they could just keep maintaining U-verse over twisted pair, even if capex stayed the same for either choice. Which is an interesting choice.

To be fair, T's capex expenditures are massive, something like $5 billion per quarter or more. So to 'materially alter', it'd have to be like $3 billion a year or more.

Indeed. And there is the possibility that they just won't move on anything until FY 2014 or later. Though commandar brings up the point that even if they didn't have the capital themselves to deploy fiber, we _did_ give them the capital once and they squandered it.

Interesting how the economic impact of this isn't discussed. They very well could've done this years ago, and given the economy a boost. By not doing this, they hold back the American economy.

As a non-American, I can only imagine the class-action lawsuits...

Not only that, but the telcos were given massive federal subsidies which they were supposed to use to expand high speed internet connectivity and they never really followed through on their end of the deal.

EDIT:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...

For some companies, it is important to keep a good public image, and for some it's not. But it's always done to maximize their profits, not because of good intentions.

For example: Valve, Google and Facebook all try to be "good," since their target audience are often young, technology-oriented people who care about how good the company is.

But for some corporations, it doesn't matter what their users think. Majority of AT&T customers are average people, who know nothing about ISPs and slow Internet. They just want their "Skype-box" to work.

It only doesn't matter to some, when they managed to get a monopolistic control over the market (like happens to be the case with ISPs). I'm sure many average users are well aware about how bad is a slow Internet or a broken customer service.

And the correct response should be those communities throwing off any constraints on people "competing" with the communications infrastructure.

My first thoughts exactly when I saw this post. Well actually my first thought was "Doesn't OP mean Google is laying fiber in Austin? Ooooooohh I get it...". I'm happy about this -- it means that Google's mission is coming along nicely. Screw AT&T.

Unfortunately, the public doesn't have many competitive alternatives for high-speed internet, so AT&T probably doesn't care.

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