AT&T paints false fiber picture with official service reports

25 July 2017 by Steve Blum
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Fiber claims but copper service levels.

There’s something odd about the broadband availability data that AT&T submits to the California Public Utilities Commission. While doing research for the Broadband Infrastructure Assessment and Action Plan I recently completed for the City of West Sacramento (and from which this blog post liberally borrows), I noticed that AT&T claims to provide fiber-to-the-premise service (FTTP), and only FTTP service, in 31 West Sacramento census blocks, which represents 6% of AT&T’s service area.

These census blocks generally correspond to recently developed areas or areas that are targeted for future development. The kind of greenfield construction work where AT&T and other telecoms companies routinely use fiber. But it seems that FTTP coverage in these blocks is partial at best, and many, if not most, homes still receive service via copper wires.

In effect, AT&T is inaccurately reporting that all 31 of these census blocks are completely served by fiber infrastructure, and is not reporting the other types of technologies present. By contrast, in census blocks where only copper-based service is available, AT&T will report multiple technologies, for example VDSL and legacy DSL, if both are present.

A couple of things might be going on. It’s possible that AT&T is just being lazy and only reporting its marquee service levels in any given census block. But it’s also possible that it reflects the new and misleading “Fiber” brand it’s slapping on copper-based service. Or rather foreshadows it, since the reports predated the rebranding. The rationale appears to be that the service is delivered via fiber to central locations within neighborhoods – often referred to as nodes – with the final link accomplished using copper wires. But that’s fiber-to-the-node – FTTN – and not FTTP.

It’s probably a lost cause to try to get AT&T and other telecoms companies to stop playing these kinds of word games, but that doesn’t mean everyone else has to play them too. Insist on the truth.