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AT&T discovers North Carolina

1 February 2015 by Steve Blum
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It’s tough work chasing Google.

AT&T is going on a hiring binge in North Carolina. According to a press release it issued on Friday…

AT&T today announced it is looking to fill nearly 100 new technician positions in North Carolina…

In North Carolina, AT&T launched U-verse with AT&T GigaPower Dec. 8 in Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Winston-Salem, and also plans to bring the service to Durham, Charlotte and Greensboro. U-verse with AT&T GigaPower provides customers access to the fastest Internet available from AT&T, featuring speeds up to 1 gigabit per second.

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G.fast means fiber speeds over copper, up to a point

12 December 2014 by Steve Blum
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The point where the infrastructure collapses.

A short range, high speed technology standard for broadband over copper phone lines has been approved by the International Telecommunications Union. The G.fast standard is intended to make fiber-class speeds possible over legacy lines, with a maximum distance of 400 meters between the customer and the nearest fiber node.

Practical distances, though, are much shorter. “Service rate performance targets” – total bandwidth which can be split between up and down loads – are…

500-1000 Mb/s for FTTB deployments at less than 100m, straight loops
500 Mb/s at 100m
200 Mb/s at 200m
150 Mb/s at 250m

Bell Labs has succeeded in pushing a gigabit over 70 meters of pristine plant and 500 Mbps over 100 meters of lousy copper, using its implementation of an earlier version of the G.fast… More

Oops, AT&T makes persuasive case that Title II is better than the alternative

30 November 2014 by Steve Blum
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AT&T spins a cautionary tale.

In the what were they thinking? category, AT&T is trying to slam the idea of common carrier broadband regulation (aka Title II) by posting a lengthy account of a bureaucratic battle it’s fighting over arcane inter-carrier rules (h/t to the Baller-Herbst list for the pointer). True, introducing any kind of regulation makes life more complicated, and companies with the strongest market position will be the hardest hit. Which is the point, of course: common carrier rules exist to provide a counterweight to dominant companies in a monopolised market.… More

AT&T tells FCC sorry, we meant to say we're bailing on DSL, not fiber

28 November 2014 by Steve Blum
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Under fire from the FCC, AT&T is walking back a statement by CEO Randall Stephenson that the company will stop building out fiber while common carrier regulation of broadband is on the table. With the exception, Stephenson said, of 2 million homes that were promised as part of AT&T’s bid to get regulatory approval of its purchase of DirecTv.

That statement, made at an investment conference and likely unscripted, provoked a demand from the FCC for AT&T to explain itself.… More

FCC looks at telcos' copper network retirement by neglect, considers forced sales

26 November 2014 by Steve Blum
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Landline telephone companies are backing off from traditional Plain Old Telephone Service in favor of less regulated and more advanced Internet Protocol technologies. When they invest in upgrades, it’s usually fiber and not copper-based. As a result, there’s a move away from copper networks and associated legacy services.

In a notice approved last week and published yesterday, the FCC is looking for comments on how it should regulate that process. One of the questions the commission wants to answer is what do about de facto retirement of copper plant, where telephone companies simply let unprofitable network segments rot on the poles…

There are numerous allegations that in some cases incumbent LECs are failing to maintain their copper networks that have not undergone the Commission’s existing copper retirement procedures…First, to establish whether there is a factual basis for new rules in this area, are incumbent LECs in some circumstances neglecting copper to the point where it is no longer reliably usable?

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FCC squeezes the AT&T GigaWeasel

17 November 2014 by Steve Blum
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Sneak peak at AT&T’s response.

The FCC slapped back at AT&T on Friday, demanding it turn over information describing exactly what it means when it says it’s going to build fiber to 2 million more homes if its deal to buy DirecTv is approved, but will otherwise stop upgrading systems while the FCC decides whether to regulate broadband as a common carrier service.

That was the gist of comments made on Wednesday by AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson (h/t to Fred Pilot at Eldo Telecom for the heads up).… More

Rural broadband needs are low and highly confidential, AT&T says

24 October 2014 by Steve Blum
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AT&T knows what rural broadband customers need. And it’s not nearly as much as what people living in high potential urban and suburban communities need, according to arguments AT&T and DirecTv are making to the FCC, in support of their proposed merger…

Within its wireline footprint, AT&T will extend its ultra-fast, fiber-to-the-premises (“FTTP”) GigaPower wireline broadband service with speeds of up to 1 Gbps to at least 2 million locations. At the same time, in rural, often underserved areas, AT&T will deploy fixed wireless local loop (“WLL”) broadband to an additional 13 million locations.

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Google's bootprint in Austin won't be Texas-sized

15 October 2014 by Steve Blum
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google press release
Click for a somewhat bigger version.

Google Fiber plans to start offering gigabit service in a handful of Austin neighborhoods in December. That’s the word from a press conference held by Google earlier today. Details are sketchy so far – all I could find in the way of coverage this afternoon was a brief write-up on a website published by a local newspaper, Community Impact.

The article, bylined by Joe Lanane, identifies Austin’s South Lamar, Zilker, Bouldin and Travis Heights neighborhoods as ground zero, and quotes Mark Strama, Google’s local manager, as saying…

That is where we will start—that is not where we will finish…Not every part of Austin will get fiber, but all areas will have the opportunity, and we will build in the areas with the highest demand.”

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Subsidising AT&T fiber to boost bandwidth for schools could be a net loss for rural areas

9 October 2014 by Steve Blum
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More federal subsidies for fiber build outs and connections for schools in rural areas, as FCC chair Tom Wheeler has suggested in a recent speech is a fine idea as far as it goes. But unless the money is used to create infrastructure that’s available on a competitive basis to all users – residents, businesses and local governments, as well as schools – the net result could be more expensive and less capable access for people in rural areas.… More

AT&T says up is the new down

24 August 2014 by Steve Blum
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The best kind goes both ways.

Call it GigaPower or GigaWeasel, AT&T is at least acknowledging that its much-hyped but little seen upgrade program needs to meet rising customer expectations for broadband speeds. And interestingly, according to a story by Sue Marek in Fierce Telecom, the company is also embracing the idea that upstream speeds are rapidly becoming at least as important to subscribers as downstream speeds…

AT&T Group President and Chief Strategy Officer John Stankey said that upstream traffic is growing at double the rate of downstream traffic thanks to so many users uploading photos and video content via social networking sites.

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