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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.… More

AT&T uses federal subsidies to offer expensive, slow broadband

12 July 2017 by Steve Blum
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Never give a sucker an even break.

AT&T’s federally subsidised wireless Internet service is costly, compared to what wireline customers pay. The fixed wireless service has supposedly been offered in Georgia for a couple of months, and AT&T announced it was expanding it to rural customers in eight more states immediately, with nine others, including California, slated to get it by the end of the year. It’s difficult to tell whether or where AT&T is actually delivering it, though.… More

Consider who pays for broadband studies, but don't stop there

2 July 2017 by Steve Blum
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Gamblers or exiled royalty?

I’ve commented on a couple of university studies recently, one critical of municipal broadband’s business model and the other ripping AT&T’s infrastructure upgrade redlining in California. In neither case did I write about who picked up the tab for the work. That’s because I thought that both analyses stood on their own. But it’s a fair question to ask and, for the muni broadband study at least, it’s a significant one because the source of the money was the primary basis for challenging the work.… More

AT&T fiber redlines low income communities, U.C. Berkeley study finds

21 June 2017 by Steve Blum
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Where high income households are thick on the ground, AT&T builds out fiber to the home systems, but does minimal upgrades for middle income areas and leaves low income communities with 1990s-style legacy DSL or nothing at all. That’s the top line conclusion from a study done by U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society…

  • The median household income of California communities with access to AT&T’s fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network is $94,208. This exceeds by $32,297 the $61,911 median household income for all California households in the AT&T wireline footprint.
… More

Landline, mobile and DirecTv workers walk out on AT&T

20 May 2017 by Steve Blum
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It’s a warning shot, not a full on strike, but even so thousands of AT&T employees left work yesterday and don’t plan to come back until Monday. According to the Los Angeles Times, 17,000 members of the Communications Workers of America, which is the primary union representing AT&T employees, walked off the job in California and Nevada, where they’ve been working without a contract for 13 months.

They’re part of a total of nearly 40,000 workers that went on strike Friday.… More

Subsidise what we're already doing, telecoms companies tell CPUC

17 April 2017 by Steve Blum
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Give me the money!

Big telecoms companies don’t want California broadband infrastructure subsidies to go to potential competitors, and they don’t want to be pushed into spending any more capital on upgrades than they’ve already budgeted. AT&T, Frontier Communications and the cable industry’s California lobbying front took a defensive posture in comments regarding broadband development priorities drafted by the California Public Utilities Commission. It was in response to a staff white paper that took a first shot at a quantitative analysis of how to get the greatest benefit out of the roughly $60 million still available for infrastructure grants in the California Advanced Services Fund.… More

More low income homes are smartphone-only as homework gap grows

26 March 2017 by Steve Blum
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Barely more than half of U.S. households with incomes less than $30,000 a year have bona fide broadband service, and disproportionately rely exclusively on smart phones for Internet access. A report published by the Pew Research Center shows a growing gap between the quality and quantity of broadband access they have to rely on, and that enjoyed by higher income households, those with $100,000 or more in annual earnings. This disparity impacts their ability to find jobs and get an education…

In 2016, one-fifth of adults living in households earning less than $30,000 a year were “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they owned a smartphone but did not have broadband internet at home.

… More

AT&T's national 911 wireless fail is business as usual

10 March 2017 by Steve Blum
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Consider this your notification.

No one knows yet why AT&T’s mobile phone customers couldn’t connect with 911 centers on Wednesday night. AT&T refuses to explain and the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t know either, saying only that its “public safety professionals are on the case”. The extent of the outage is unknown as well, with reports varying from “nationwide” to “likely thousands. Maybe millions”.

It appears that AT&T let a few public safety agencies know about the outage, but not all and probably not most.… More

Competition, and something more, drives Comcast upgrade in Huntsville

15 February 2017 by Steve Blum
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Demand.

Chalk up another win for broadband competition. Comcast announced that it was expanding its next generation – DOCSIS 3.1 – cable modem footprint to Huntsville, Alabama, and would be offering gigabit-level service to at least some customers. Details on service locations, roll out schedule and prices were lacking, though.

What clearly isn’t lacking is a competitive threat. Huntsville’s publicly owned electric utility is in the process of building a fiber to the home network that will be operated by Google Fiber and offer gigabit service at about half the price that Comcast charges in the four cities where it’s already offering it.… More

5G for fixed service is so ordinary says T-Mobile

28 January 2017 by Steve Blum
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It’s like I said, their view never changes.

There’s a war of words between T-Mobile and its larger competitors, AT&T and Verizon, over using advanced mobile technologies – 5G is the undefined buzz word – as a DSL replacement to provide fixed Internet service to homes and businesses. Neville Ray, T-Mobile’s chief technology officer, says 2017 isn’t the year to get excited about 5G, particularly AT&T’s and Verizon’s version of it…

No one’s more excited about this brilliant technology than I am.

… More