AT&T does not see fixed wireless millimeter wave broadband in your future if you live in or around a major city.

John Stephens, AT&T’s chief financial officer, today reiterated to shareholders that building a small cell network for urban and suburban fixed wireless service does not make much sense from a business perspective.

“It’s the cost efficiency,” Stephens told an audience at Cowen and Company’s 46th Annual Technology, Media & Telecom Broker Conference. “Once you [get] the fixed wireless connection from the alley to your house, that’s great you can do that, but you have to get it from the alley into the core network.”

Stephens

Stephens noted that once AT&T realized it would require a collection of small cells to hand wireless traffic off, “building that out can be very expensive when you’re likely doing it in an urban market in a residential area that already has a lot of fiber [or] a lot of competition [from] incumbent telephone and cable companies.”

AT&T sees a likely different future for fixed wireless based on in its ongoing trials underway in Austin, Tex. — selling the service to commercial and manufacturing customers with robotic equipment and other machinery that need instant and fast wireless communications to communicate with each other and back to a central point.

Stephens believes a better idea for its 30 million U-verse fiber-near-the-home customers is to extend fiber directly to those customers’ homes. Stephens said AT&T would be financially better off scrapping the remaining copper wire running the last 500 feet from a customer’s home or business to the nearest fiber-equipped pedestal and give customers dedicated fiber to the home service instead.

“It may be very inexpensive for us compared to the [5G] alternative and gives the customer a tremendous level of service,” Stephens added.

Where millimeter wave could make sense is in exurban and rural areas where clusters of homes could potentially be reached by fixed wireless, assuming there was fiber infrastructure close enough to connect those small cells to AT&T’s network. But AT&T seems to be more interested in applying the technology in commercial and Internet of Things (IoT) applications where wireless access can be essential, and would be much easier to deploy.

Verizon, in contrast, is expanding millimeter wave fixed wireless broadband trials, with the hope of selling a wireless home internet replacement.

A DNS failure took out internet service for more than 15 hours for many Charter Communications broadband customers in Texas.

Outages were first reported Wednesday evening from customers unable to reach web pages or other internet services. The outages primarily affected former Time Warner Cable customers in Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Antonio, and Austin.

A Charter spokesperson admitted there was a widespread outage last evening that extended into this morning. At 8:38am, the company suggested rebooting your cable modem to restore service, but as of lunchtime, admitted problems are ongoing in certain areas.

The outage affected the company’s broadband service and its Spectrum TV app, which relies on the internet for video streaming its cable TV service.

Some customers exploring the outage discovered the problem was with Charter’s DNS servers, which manage website addresses. All customers needed to do to restore service was to stop relying on the cable company’s DNS servers and use another provider like Google instead. (If interested, instructions are here.)

Customers were miffed that it took more than half a day to resolve the problem. Those without service can get a service credit for the outage by visiting the cable company’s website and using its online chat function to request credit.

Texas customers, our apologies as we are seeing a return of Internet service issues. Thank you for your continued patience.

— Ask Spectrum (@Ask_Spectrum) November 2, 2017

Starting tomorrow, new customers signing up for AT&T’s 100+ channel streaming television package will pay $60 a month, up from the $35 promotional price AT&T has been advertising during the holidays.

Today is the last day customers can lock in the $35/month price, and those willing to pay in advance will receive either an Amazon Fire TV Stick (prepay one month) or a 4th generation 32GB Apple TV (prepay three months).

Since launching, DirecTV Now has received mixed reviews. Many customers like the wide range of popular cable channels, and access to HBO and Cinemax for just $5 a month each. But early after launch technical glitches also proved frustrating for many subscribers. Among the most common are cryptic error messages that claim viewers are attempting to stream from outside the U.S. and another that claims customers have too many concurrent streams running. Several app updates have been released to deal with the problems, and complaints seem to be easing.

AT&T hasn’t reported how many customers convert from its free trial to become paying customers, but some analysts remain skeptical if customers without cable television care about a streaming package of linear TV, even at the $35 price point.

Fool.com:

When it first launched, Sling TV seemed like it would be a big hit. That has not proven to be the case possibly because the cord-cutting audience has learned to live without cable and the cord-never folks (people who never had cable in the first place) perhaps don’t miss what they never had.

[…] By putting an end date on this promotion, AT&T can gauge whether enough interest exists in live-streaming television for the company to continue. These are products that seem like a good idea, that have so far been rejected by the marketplace.

That may be because even the top packages from the live-streaming services have holes compared to cable. In most cases they are missing at least some broadcast networks and their interfaces — while not bad for a digital product — are clunky compared to just flipping around with a remote control.

It’s also very possible that cord-cutters and cord-nevers are finding their entertainment elsewhere.

Rutledge: Not worried about the competition

The CEO of Charter Communications continues to consider “cable TV alternatives” like Sling TV and DirecTV Now not much of a threat, because customers appreciate the convenience of having local channels and DVR capability available, and cable operators claim they provide a better set-top box experience.

“I think there’s a lot of reasons why the packages, the big rich packages, will stay together, and why people will continue to pursue their historic [consumer] patterns,” CEO Thomas Rutledge told the annual Citi 2017 Internet, Media and Telecommunications Conference in Las Vegas.

For many ordinary cable TV customers, taking the final step of canceling cable TV has been more psychologically difficult than dropping services like a landline phone because the alternatives available in the marketplace do not yet match the quality and convenience of the cable package.

AT&T apparently also believes a-la-carte cable TV sounds better in theory than practice, considering its marketing efforts have focused on a cable television replacement that most closely resembles traditional cable’s bloated TV lineup. Sling TV’s slim package has not been as successful in the marketplace as some investors had hoped.

For AT&T, there may be more at stake than just a standalone streaming television package. The company announced last week it planned to provide DirecTV Now over its 5G wireless network it plans to test in Austin later this year.

AT&T wants to see how 5G networks manage heavy video streaming traffic, according to a company news release. The development of 5G, which can achieve 14Gbps speeds in lab tests, could be critically important to AT&T’s plan to gradually decommission wired networks in its rural telephone service areas. Should AT&T be able to demonstrate 5G is a more robust replacement for traditional wired communications networks, it could bolster its argument to discontinue wired telephone and broadband service. But it could also mean the eventual end of DirecTV’s costly fleet of satellites in favor of broadband and wireless distribution.

Flash flooding in a neighborhood where storm drains were blocked by Google’s construction debris. (Image: Adolfo Romero)

Some Austin residents are fuming over the sloppy construction work and eyesores left by contractors hired by Google to install its fiber optic service.

Last year, 254 formal complaints were filed against Google and its contractors, by far the largest compared with AT&T and Time Warner Cable, which are also in the process of upgrading their networks in the city.

The epicenter of construction nightmares for homeowners is on Lambs Lane in Southeast Austin, where last October a flash flood allegedly caused by Google’s construction crews blocking nearby storm drains brought two feet of water into the home of Arnulfo and Dolores Cruz, causing $100,000 in damages.

Austin residents will receive Google Fiber service under three rate plans: $70 for 1,000/1,000Mbps or 5/1Mbps at no charge after paying a $300 construction fee. A package including television costs $130 a month.

Google Fiber announced its prices this week in anticipation of a December launch in the capital city of Texas. But Google Fiber will arrive with at least two competitors beating them to the gigabit space: Grande Communications and AT&T.

Austin is the first city in the country to have three concurrent gigabit providers. Only Time Warner Cable has elected to sit out the city’s gigabit broadband fight. Google Fiber is expected to face stiffer competition in Austin than in Kansas City and Provo, where it also operates gigabit fiber networks. AT&T U-verse with GigaPower matches Google’s $70 price and San Marcos-based Grande Communications beats it, charging $64.99 for its 1,000Mbps service.

Google is sweetening the deal by converting the former home of a children’s museum into a “Fiber Space,” a community center at 201 Colorado Street – hosting concerts, community meetings, and clubs, in addition to showcasing Google’s fiber network.

As with AT&T’s gigabit U-verse upgrade, only a limited number of residents in Austin will initially be able to get the new fiber service. Google is initially lighting up areas in south and southeastern Austin. For some, the wait to eventually sign up could take up to several years as Google slowly builds out its network in the city of 885,000 people.