AT&T won't even explore most of California and the West

17 September 2015 by Steve Blum
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Hooray, hooray, hooray!

AT&T’s GigaWeasel is slithering to more cities in the eastern half of the U.S., but it’s ignoring nearly all of the states in the Pacific and Mountain time zones (h/t to Fred Pilot at the Eldo Telecom blog for the pointer). A company blog post hypes the addition of “parts of…Jacksonville, St. Louis and San Antonio” to the list of markets where its so-called GigaPower service is available, but also adds the standard disclaimer that it’s up to 1 gigabit per second.

What that really means is that “small portions” of these markets will get fiber to the premise service, with commercial properties, particularly big buildings with lots of customers, going to the head of the line. Everyone else in the GigaPower footprint will be limited to whatever AT&T can squeeze out of its copper network, with 300 Mbps looking to be the max.

California is the only state in the western half of the U.S. to be targeted for GigaWeasel upgrades, although to be fair there’s a lot of western territory where AT&T doesn’t operate landline networks. Cupertino is the only city in California listed as having it available now. San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego are in the “being explored” category. I can only imagine AT&T execs scurrying about in pith helmets.

The rest of California and the West, at least where AT&T is the incumbent telco, apparently aren’t even worth exploring. That’s no surprise: AT&T has made it clear it won’t be investing in its wireline network, except in high potential business districts and neighborhoods.