ATT answer to google fiber?

http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/ ... b9b3e.html

AT&T has picked the St. Louis area to be one of the metro areas where it plans to build an ultra-fast fiber network that allows download speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second.

AT&T Inc. said that the cities of St. Louis, Chesterfield, Edwardsville, Florissant and Granite City would get access to AT&T U-verse’s GigaPower broadband service. The earliest the faster service would be added locally is next year.

http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news ... to-st.html


AT&T will deliver Internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit a second, about 100 times faster than standard Web access, according to a statement from the company.

John Sondag, president of AT&T Missouri, said the company has already built fiber networks in Chesterfield, Edwardsville, Florissant, Granite City and St. Louis city, but that fiber would still have to be laid from those nodes into homes. AT&T will need to get construction permits from those municipalities.

With this, in addition to the fact that Charter now requires each television to use a cable box, as well as the growth of services such as Netflix, Hulu Plus, and HBOGo, I feel like the reasons to hold onto Charter are shrinking. This should also help the City's growing startup scene.

Potentially fantastic news; let's hope that the municipal governments work swiftly and efficiently with AT&T to hammer out concrete plans.

^ Fair points.

I suspect it will fall somewhere in between. In other words, markets where U-verse already exists and makes money for ATT will see it. For the city, I can certainly see ATT pursuing it for the downtown and exploding central corridor with heavier concentration of residents and possibly commercial users where as a lot of neighborhoods simply won't see it.

The reality is ATT will most likely work off the U-verse spine which is a fiber network already in place with a large amount of the Capex already spent. Unlike Verizon though, ATT stopped short at the neighborhood node instead of going all the way to the house. You might well see a installation charge for remaining mile that ATT will write down or work into its monthly rate for recovery. The best example I can work off is adding new utility service, say another electric meter to property. The installation gets charged to owner and not capex because the nearby electrical line already exists. Another example, getting the phone for next to nothing if you sign onto a 2 year service plan.

The other reality is fiber is not cheap. I listened to a fascinating interview with the Mayor of Provo, Utah about Google Fiber. What I think most people don't realize was that the city put in most of the fiber before Google came along with I believe a $30 or $40 million bond issue several years before. The city was facing a $20 million bill to upgrade the fiber infrastructure and complete remaining connections until Google came along and gave them a pretty good deal. That equates to $50 - 60 million investment just to get Provo where it is at and a big chunk of the that was taxpayer dollars. Have to give Google Fiber credit to realize and seize upon an opportunity when it saw one.

zing

—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundre ... -it-unused

More fiber: St. Louis to be AT&T’s 11th GigaPower city

AT&T Missouri President John Sondag said St. Louis officials “bent over backwards” to pave the way for AT&T’s new GigaPower service in the city. That’s a change in tune from what Internet experts perceived to be the reason St. Louis didn’t land Google Fiber earlier this year.
St. Louis will be the 11th market in the nation to receive AT&T’s fiber-speed Internet offering, expected to roll out by mid-2015. Sondag negotiated with St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay’s office to receive an expedited permitting process for the initiative. Negotiations with other cities in the area, including Florissant, Chesterfield and Edwardsville, Sondag said, are still ongoing. Sondag said the city didn’t concede as much as waiving fees.



http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/prin ... 1409917257

Forgot to post this earlier. My mom in Ferguson has ATT Fiber. Installed on May 01.

They were installing it on my street in Ucity about 2 months ago.

^^Those are pretty incredible speeds. Don't you need only ~5mbps to stream Netflix? Curious why most people would need this type of speed?

San Luis Native wrote: ↑

Jun 12, 2017

^^Those are pretty incredible speeds. Don't you need only ~5mbps to stream Netflix? Curious why most people would need this type of speed?

They only offer the 100/100 and 1000/1000($80) plans. My mother was already paying $62 for the 12/1 plan she had so it seemed negligible to pay a little more.