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On Monday, AT&T announced 38 additional cities that will eventually have access to its gigabit broadband offering – AT&T U-verse with GigaPower, but the company remains coy about the number of customers that can actually order the service today across the 56 metro areas that will eventually be served by AT&T’s fiber to the home network.
“Nearly two years ago, we successfully launched the first AT&T GigaPower metro in Austin, Tex.,” AT&T wrote in its press release. “This launch led to a major expansion in multiple metros beginning in 2014. Recently we marked a major milestone deploying the AT&T GigaPower network to more than 1 million locations, and we expect to more than double availability by the end of 2016.”
Stop the Cap! asked AT&T for information about its claim of offering service to more than “one million locations” and received a response that this number may not reflect strict availability of the gigabit service, but rather the likely number of potential customers served by a central office/exchange where GigaPower was enabled. In reality, not every customer within a central office immediately qualifies for U-verse service, as many customers have complained.
At the current rollout rate of about one million customers per year, it will take AT&T at least 12 years to achieve its goal of more than 14 million residential and commercial locations, probably in the year 2027.
The 38 metro areas that AT&T will be entering, starting with the launch of service in parts of the Los Angeles and West Palm Beach metros today, are:
- Alabama: Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile and Montgomery
- Arkansas: Fort Smith/Northwest Arkansas and Little Rock
- California: Bakersfield, Fresno, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose
- Florida: Pensacola and West Palm Beach
- Georgia: Augusta
- Indiana: Indianapolis
- Kansas: Wichita
- Kentucky: Louisville
- Louisiana: Baton Rouge, Shreveport–Bossier, Jefferson Parish region and the Northshore
- Mississippi: Jackson
- Missouri: St. Louis
- Michigan: Detroit
- Nevada: Reno
- North Carolina: Asheville
- Ohio: Cleveland and Columbus
- Oklahoma: Oklahoma City and Tulsa
- South Carolina: Charleston, Columbia and Greenville
- Tennessee: Memphis
- Texas: El Paso and Lubbock
- Wisconsin: Milwaukee
For more information on where the AT&T GigaPower network is and will become available, visit att.com/gigapowermap.
Uh huh. AT&T is taking CAF II funding and using it for wireless deployment. That gigapower? Those current U-Verse properties are going to be sold off.
I agree in rural areas this is definitely the case, but I don’t see it in urban. AT&T’s wireless broadband depends on modestly used cell sites to assure capacity.
trust me Phil. i live 7.1 miles from downtown San Francisco. AT&T does not want this area. The sooner they get to sell this area to Frontier or CenturyLink the sooner they get to bring wireless.
Does ATT need to only upgrade each central office to allow giga-bit or are there other things that need happen in the neighborhood; with the VRAD box et al ? I’m in an area that was already announced, but the ATT address check indicates I can still only get 75M. Time-Warner offers 50M in my neighborhood.
Usually the worst problems are for those that can’t even get plain U-verse in their home while the neighbors up the street have it. As I understand it, there is fiber to the neighborhood node that should not require upgrading, but they have to ditch the remaining copper between that pedestal and you and replace it with fiber to power gigabit. If you are in a difficult to reach area, AT&T will not be in a hurry to reach you. They love multi-dwelling units and new housing developments first. For lesser U-verse upgrades, it was about the quality of the… Read more »
The deployment can be slow. I’ve had fiber and a new pedestal in my yard for 7 months with no hint of when service will go live. I will say that in the Raleigh area the deathstar is stringing and burying so much fiber it’s hard to imagine unless you actually see it. The announcement of google fiber has gotten the deathstar off their duff, but this roll out is taking longer than expected. They assure me service will be live by January, of course they also said it would be live by November, so who knows at this point?