AT&T's 'Expansion' of 1 Gbps to 100 Cities is a Big, Fat Bluff
dslreports.com
dslreports.com
When I finally squeezed the actual speed of it out of him the answer was 18 Mbps, for $60 a month (of course he could get me a special deal of $40 for the first 3 months, which is the same deal as on their website).
I've used them before (AT&T Uverse) and they require an ATT router/modem, for an additional fee of course, even though using their hardware is technically completely unnecessary.
I actually told him that Time Warner was currently cheaper and more reliable than what he was offering, which is true unfortunately.
AT&T is a joke.
This is what is sold in the UK a lot, its called fibre to the cabinet (FTC) and does indeed make a difference, if your cabinet is on the street corner (100m) that beats the 1 mile maybe to the actual exchange as a lot of internet speed is dictated by the decay one gets with copper signals.
[0] http://www.thinkbroadband.com/guide/fibre-broadband.html
That's not to even mention their HORRIBLE modems that they force you to use after migrating to U-Verse. Search for "nvg510" and you'll see how happy your service will be afterwards, assuming they aren't using old unreliable DSL pairs that make it so your specific house can only get 6mbit or 1.5mbit, despite your neighbor getting 16mbit
Oh, and also in my city you can't even buy just U-Verse internet. you have to buy into their crap "digital" (another word for heavily MPEG compressed) TV service
I think the author is being hypocritical in holding this against AT&T while ignoring the fact that Google is only rolling out fiber in cities that agree to basically leave them alone from regulatory standpoint. And while the author complains about AT&T not upgrading legacy DSL users, you don't exactly see Google or anyone else going after that "lucrative" market.[1] You don't see Google, or anyone else, jockeying to offer service in cities with insane build-out requirements.
The author, Karl Bode, clearly understands why nobody wants to roll out these services: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Baltimore-Still-Begging-V... ("Baltimore is one of many cities who simply want somebody to come in and provide better broadband service, but don't offer an attractive enough return on the investment for any large, investor-forcused private company to bother.") That's true for Google as much as it's true for AT&T. Google's ability to cross-subsidize with its advertising business changes the numbers a bit, but at scale, that's the bottom line.
That said, I think Google Fiber adds a lot of value. I don't think they're going to shame AT&T/Verizon into doing deployments that don't yield an attractive return on capital. It may have the more important effect of putting municipalities on notice that if they want fiber, from anyone, they need to cut the strings attached.
AT&T and Google both play the regulatory game but AT&T ends up gouging their consumers and not delivering on advertised speeds.
I haven't seen it but I'd be willing to bet that the Google TV experience is far superior to what Time Warner and AT&T offer, which is horrible. They've been selling TV service for a long time and still have laggy and unintuitive on-screen menus and guides.
The telcos have already promised to lay fiber, received concessions for it, and delivered little to nothing. Google may start ripping off taxpayers like that, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt until I see it.
When I look at Google services, I see a lot of monopolies forming. For example, Hangouts now takes over SMS messages, and is automatically installed on all Android devices as a system app that cannot be removed. Or, in order to interact with Youtube, one requires a wholly unrelated public Google+ profile.
For someone to say that Google is incapable of abusing monopolies for strategic reasons including profit, while they are already abusing monopolies for strategic reasons including profit, is amazing to me.
I have used telecommunication services for over a decade now, and I have never once done business with AT&T or a Mabell company.
Perhaps it's YOU who needs a sense of proportion. It isn't 1984 anymore. Mabell isn't a massive monopoly: Google, however, is becoming one.
...Verizon, SBC, CenturyLink, Qwest, FairPoint, Frontier, etc.? Eh, seems unlikely. Or perhaps the extent of your telecom purchasing is cell service from an MVNO? Guess where the majority of your payments are going... Apparently it is difficult for some people outside telecom to separate what's going on from the marketing of what's going on. Don't feel bad: back in the late 1990s I believed the hype too.
Of course, it's easy to play this game with any company. Google's profit margin is over 20%. According to this reasoning, every year Google is "ripping off" the public to the tune of $6 billion. Obviously it's ridiculous to just pick a number as the "right" profit margin for an industry and call everything above that number "excess profits." But that's precisely the premise underlying the $200 billion "rip off."
There was no "rip off." The premise of the 1996 reform was that deregulation of the industry would create an incentive for companies to invest private capital. And that has proven true. Over the last two decades, telecom and cable companies have been among those with the highest capital expenditures. What happened is that nobody predicted wireless would become such a big deal. So instead of going into fiber, all that money was invested in wireless instead. That's the major reason why fiber deployment never really materialized--spending that money on wireless made a lot more sense.
And from a consumer standpoint, it still mostly does. I don't even have internet service at my house--but I've got two different LTE subscriptions.
This comparison is invalid because Google's business is fundamentally different than a telecom in every relevant dimension. Telecoms sell a commodity product with technology they source entirely from third parties, the only form of product differentiation they have is geographical monopoly, and it is a zero-sum game: basically none of AT&T's budget goes to R&D [1], and all of it goes to operating AT&T's existing business exactly as it is now [2]. Meanwhile Google's core business is basically the opposite in every dimension.
A much better comparison would be to a water company or power company that has "too high" of a profit margin. And of course people do complain about that.
[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/meet-the-group-trying-to-make-at-t-...
[2] http://www.att.com/Investor/ATT_Annual/2013/downloads/att_20...
Water companies and power companies are generally, true monopolies, in that they're protected from competition and guaranteed a rate of return on their investment. AT&T and the other telecoms are very different. They might have certain geographic advantages, but AT&T is rarely the only wireless or telecom provider in any given market, and its capital expenditures come out of it's own pocket. It can't turn to a rate setting board like a power company or water company to guarantee cash flow to cover investment.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to develop telecom as a regulated monopoly, which worked just fine in the U.S. for the better part of a century, then you need to give companies monopoly protections. If you want to have a market, then you can't regulate rates of return. When you pretend to have a market, then encumber it with excessive regulation, you can't complain when companies don't invest private money into expanding infrastructure.
> AT&T is rarely the only wireless or telecom provider in any given market
That is technically true, but I would paint the same facts as "approximately 96% of the population has at most two wireline providers". [2] This is an optimistic estimate: "the data used here do not provide adequate information on price and performance to determine if multiple providers in a given area compete head-to-head".
> If you want to have a market, then you can't regulate rates of return.
I don't disagree with you there. I think where we disagree is that you think a competitive market for wireline broadband in the US in 2014 is a possible scenario. In my mind, the regulated monopoly (or public utility) is the only viable model.
[1] http://www.strategyand.pwc.com/global/home/what-we-think/glo...
[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=l8oI5rA_NpQC&pg=PA37&lpg=PA...
This effectively became impossible when the internet turned out to work fine over both telephone and cable TV wires and then subsumed the respective franchises as over the top services. If AT&T had monopoly protections again then Comcast couldn't operate in the same geographic area anymore. I have to imagine the cable TV industry would object to its forced dissolution strenuously enough to scuttle any plans to do such a thing.
But why do you believe that monopoly protections are necessary for utility regulations? Suppose we regulate AT&T as a utility and then let Comcast carry on unregulated in competition with them. Individual customers can choose whether they want the regulated entity or the unregulated one. In the worst case one of them goes bankrupt so the reason why monopoly protections are impractical is eliminated, and the other one becomes a regulated monopoly.
Spending money on wireless rather than fiber made more sense because that segment has even less competition and consumer power than broadband. They're making money hand over fist there; spare us the crocodile tears over the capital investments.
Also, on what planet is wireless less competitive than broadband? Most subscribers have 3-4 credible wireless choices. The reason companies are spending money on wireless is that: 1) its less of a regulatory morass than wireline; and 2) there is insanely high consumer demand.
The point is not that every home in the nation should be connected by fiber: that would be unnecessary if the FCC ever got off its ass on unlicensed wireless but more to the point was never feasible even while the RBOC lobbyists were promising it. Promising what they could not deliver is really not different than failing to deliver what they promised.
It's funny, but a fiber in the ground is actually an example of a network component that wouldn't require much effort from a regulated provider to remain useful. If a regulator prevented vertical integration, other operators could compete to "light" the fiber, and that would be enough to accommodate innovation. In fact that's what happens in other nations.
There are two actually-independent wireless network operators in the USA. Sprint and T-Mobile both have to rely too much on the big two for backhaul to really threaten them commercially. While it is true that much spending is in response to demand, that demand would be quite different in a market where the FCC allowed actually-innovative services. Also the RBOCs and their two mutant descendants don't get to complain about the regulations they themselves wrote.
The net effect I see here is that the telcos keep selling us less and less data, at a progressively lower speed, for more and more money.
I had better and faster DSL service 20 full years ago, in Iowa City, than AT&T offers me now in the middle of Silicon Valley. And that AT&T service costs more, too. That is a major red flag and indicates that something is seriously wrong.
When Verizon FIOS first came about I was super excited. And then I learned that since my town is part of ATT-land, I'm forever locked out of obtaining it.
A few years later ATT announces UVerse (fiber-to-the-home) in select markets. Again I'm super excited, and I anxiously await the day it's available for my street.
Years later that day finally comes. Only then do I realize that they have since re-branded their entire DSL product line as "UVerse". So all ATT customers can get UVerse, great! But only a very select few will actually get fiber-to-the-home.
What a load of crap.
Charging $30/month to not spy on me is bullshit, though.
This jives w/ what the article says:
>>What's actually happening is that AT&T is upgrading a few
>>high-end developments where fiber was already in the ground
>>(these users were previously capped at DSL speeds) and
>>pretending it's a serious expansion of fixed-line broadband.
On the other hand, Google Fiber seems to be planning connectivity all over the place, since they're tasked w/ providing free service to various community hubs selected by the city which are widely spread out.
The reps won't even give the speed of the line until asked and the majority of responses when asked are Download Speeds of 15-30Mbps. Time Warner has cable options doubling this and the price is better.
AT&T is basically trying to confuse their customers before google fiber hits Austin and it's the most immoral thing I've seen in a long time.
I had AT&T sales reps come by the house a few weeks ago to try and sell me U-Verse, and I was able to tell them more about my service that I already had than they were told to offer to anyone else in my neighborhood.
The only thing they had to hook me on was TV, and I told them we were getting rid of all TV service.
And no, I didn't really feel sorry for them at all. Three nice young people out for a neighborhood walk where they will probably make a years worth of sales commissions in just a few hours. They don't deserve any pity or sympathy from me.
I had such a poor experience with Uverse when it first came out that it made even TWC internet look significantly better so I've stuck with Time Warner.
I have Grande and AT&T fiber to my home.
AT&T will not sell me their (current 300Mbps, future 1Gbps) service.
Grande will.
When Google Fiber arrives in my neighborhood, I'll probably keep both Grande and Google. (Because it makes for an excellent test of pfSense, and as co-owner of the company behind pfSense, I'm into testing it.)
But not over CAT-3 neighborhood wiring.
The fact is nobody, not AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, or anyone else, is eager to deploy fiber to each home's "de-marc." It's expensive, time-consuming, and labor intensive.
The last mile is a good place for municipalities to get involved, possibly under some form of revenue sharing plan with the carriers.