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AT&T The Internet United States

AT&T Lobbies Against Nationwide Fiber, Says 10Mbps Uploads Are Good Enough (arstechnica.com) 260

Posted by BeauHD from the don't-fight-it-embrace-it dept.
AT&T is lobbying against proposals to subsidize fiber-to-the-home deployment across the U.S., arguing that rural people don't need fiber and should be satisfied with Internet service that provides only 10Mbps upload speeds. Ars Technica reports: AT&T Executive VP Joan Marsh detailed the company's stance Friday in a blog post titled "Defining Broadband For the 21st Century." AT&T's preferred definition of 21st-century broadband could be met with wireless technology or AT&T's VDSL, a 14-year-old system that brings fiber to neighborhoods but uses copper telephone wires for the final connections into each home.

"[T]here would be significant additional cost to deploy fiber to virtually every home and small business in the country, when at present there is no compelling evidence that those expenditures are justified over the service quality of a 50/10 or 100/20Mbps product," AT&T wrote. (That would be 50Mbps download speeds with 10Mbps upload speeds or 100Mbps downloads with 20Mbps uploads.) AT&T said that "overbuilding" areas that already have acceptable speeds "would needlessly devalue private investment and waste broadband-directed dollars." "Overbuilding" is what the broadband industry calls one ISP building in an area already served by another ISP, whereas Internet users desperate for cheaper, faster, and more reliable service call that "broadband competition."
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AT&T Lobbies Against Nationwide Fiber, Says 10Mbps Uploads Are Good Enough More

AT&T Lobbies Against Nationwide Fiber, Says 10Mbps Uploads Are Good Enough

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  • So a business selling internet access does not (Score:5, Informative)

    by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:06PM (#61215284)
    want competition! And is more than willing to buy as many government politicians and bureaucrats as necessary to limit it. I am shocked!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by msauve ( 701917 )
      Reminds me of a (very large retail) customer a past employer had. They used ATT to provide frame relay (it was a while ago) service to a couple of thousand sites. There was an SLA. There was an outage which affected credit card transactions enterprise-wide. They called ATT on the carpet for it, and ATT just said "it doesn't count if it's less than 10 minutes." (which is huge in retail, and wasn't an exemption in the SLA).

      Also reminds me of the old Lily Tomlin SNL sketch [vimeo.com] - "We don't care, we don't have to,

  • What happened to AT&T? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bignetbuy ( 1105123 ) <dm.area2408@com> on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:08PM (#61215292) Journal

    Are they refusing the obvious because they are so badly managed and carry so much debt? This company used to be the gold standard of network-service providers - like a UUnet. Now? They're a laughing stock that has to be shamed into delivering minimal fiber speeds.

    It's a sad day.

    • Re:What happened to AT&T? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:18PM (#61215340) Homepage

      Don't forget this isn't that AT&T anymore. That's a very important mistake they want you to make. This "AT&T" is actually a completely unrelated company called Cingular that got away with naming itself AT&T after the previous AT&T folded about 15 or so years ago.

      • Aha! That's a great point. I completely forgot about the Cingular taint. Thank you. :)

      • They used to tell me that I had 'an old blue account', because Cingular was very orange.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by ghoul ( 157158 )
          The company literally was founded by Graham Bell who invented the phone. Its like saying Apple is not really innovative in the iOS space.
  • Other countries are in the process of switching off copper all together and moving to an all fiber network.

    • Tell that to the astroturf posters above who are apparently happy with crappy xDSL tech from like 15yrs ago. Reminds me of that old Bill Gates quote about 640K RAM being good enough. Just absurd.

      AT&T can push 400Gbps and higher speeds on inter-city links but God forbid they should deliver reasonable speeds to their customers.

    • It’s sad. I look at the telephone poles in my area, sagging with far too much copper and they still can’t manage to upgrade it to fiber in a reasonable timeline. I can’t imagine they have any customers, as Cable provides an order of magnitude better service. Just strange they can’t phase out all the copper for a ~20 mile stretch and migrate all existing copper customers to a small gateway midspan.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jezwel ( 2451108 )
      Come to Australia and tell our conservative party that - they're all over the moon at how they "turned around a failed FTTP rollout" and replaced it with xDSL & HFC over existing infrastructure. Heck they even replaced failing copper lead-ins for FTTC deployments...

      The result is something that cost easily as much as an FTTP rollout & costs 3x as much to maintain, is far less reliable (especially in wet weather), cannot be easily upgraded to faster speeds, and is generally lamented as the biggest wa

  • If man were meant to fly god would have given him wings!!! When the Wright brothers first flew, I'm not sure they envisioned rovers on Mars or Starship type craft soon to take people to the moon. What are we going to miss if we don't press on (it's a rhetorical question).

  • Devalue private investments (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheNameOfNick ( 7286618 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:22PM (#61215358)

    Telcos have been given so much public money in return for empty promises that the existing networks can hardly be considered a private investment. FTTH should be in every business and home by now. That it isn't is devaluing public investment.

    On the matter of upload speeds: If you need to be in a teleconference (or Zoom call as these are apparently called now) while your kids are attending online classes, you know 10 Mbit/s isn't going to cut it.

  • I lived in Strasbourg France for two years (Score:4, Insightful)

    by maynard ( 3337 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:23PM (#61215364) Journal

    We got fiber to the house. Everyone did. Gb down 100mbit up. Fastest internet I've ever had. They sent 4k TV through that pipe too. Pretty much every TV station was 4k to homes via fiber. And you got silly bandwidth too. Took the high speed rail to Paris every few weeks too, 230kmh.

    America is very behind.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by xlsior ( 524145 )

      We got fiber to the house. Everyone did. Gb down 100mbit up. Fastest internet I've ever had. They sent 4k TV through that pipe too. Pretty much every TV station was 4k to homes via fiber. And you got silly bandwidth too. Took the high speed rail to Paris every few weeks too, 230kmh.

      America is very behind.

      It's much easier to just keep saying that you're number one, than to have some introspection and admit that there could be room for improvement.

    • Re:I lived in Strasbourg France for two years (Score:5, Informative)

      by inhuman_4 ( 1294516 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @08:13PM (#61215528)

      America is very behind.

      That's a nice anecdote, but the speed testing data [speedtest.net] tells a different story. The US (180) and France (184) are practically the same. Most of Europe is in fact ranks lower than the US.

      • Itâ(TM)s the difference between true market forces and governments demanding certain speeds. The ISPs in Europe often give labeled speeds demanded by the government and then blame the exchanges and the government infrastructure for failing to actually provide sufficient bandwidth or connections to peopleâ(TM)s homes.

        In the US, if you want faster speeds, you can just pay more and when sufficient people pay for more, they can go ahead and implement upgrades.

      • And whom would you believe such numbers when everyone I know from the US is complaining about non existing high speed internet, especially in rural areas?

        Or unaffordable, especially in rural areas? And still expensive in urban areas?

        The numbers are pretty meaningless anyway, as there is no explanation what they are actually measuring.

        • And whom would you believe such numbers when everyone I know from the US is complaining about non existing high speed internet, especially in rural areas?

          In the battle between: a) actually measured values and b) "everyone I know says". I'm most definitely going with the data. That's what a reasonable person would do. Any data, even if it's seriously flawed, is better than he said / she said.

          • Well,
            the data is clear. USA has worst internet on the planet.
            Price wise, speed wise.

            Oki, better than places were there is no internet ... accepted.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        Speedtest data is almost completely meaningless... There are so many problems with their data set.

        It is completely unscientific, and in no way benchmarks the performance of the ISP or the country. For example:

        Higher speed connections may be bottlenecked by end user equipment, poor wifi signal, misconfiguration etc - things outside the control of the ISP.
        Most ISPs provide multiple tiers of service, users may achieve a lower score because they intentionally bought a lower service tier rather than it being an

        • Speedtest data is almost completely meaningless... There are so many problems with their data set.

          I'm sure there are tons of problems with their data set. But wouldn't call it meaningless. It's still a hell of a lot better measure of reality than one guy's experience living in one city in France. If you've got better data to look at then please share.

      • Umm.. I think you need a histogram, you obviously can't just average things like 10mb, 100mb, 1000mb

        You're averaging away a lot of shitty DSL with cable and fiber speeds on a logarithmic scale. If the whole country actually had ~200mbps internet we'd actually be pretty damn well off, but their 1g doesn't make your 10mb able to Webex and Google at the same time.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        What that sites doesn't show is the disparity. If almost everyone in France can get at least 100mbps up but in the US you are either stuck with 1mbps up or enjoying 1000mbps up, well the average might be the same but one situation is a lot worse than the other.

    • Depending on rail 270 - 330 km/h.

  • 10MB or "up to" 10MB? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:25PM (#61215372)
    Since we are talking about upload speed, 10MB is a pretty reasonable speed for most users - it would allow a couple of people in the house to participate in a video conference. However if the actual upload speed is really only 1-2MB, which would be common at the end of a long DSL run, it doesn't really cut it.

    • I'd bet my Gig/E connect that these goofy speeds will come with some cap or bandwidth throttling mechanism ala Comcast or these mobile networks.

      I still can't believe we're talking about some 15-20yr old copper tech in 2021. That's just shameful.

      This AT&T nonsense is just their management trying to skimp on delivering respectable internet speeds.

      And for those people saying 10Mbps is "good enough" - take out all that "extra" RAM in your PCs. Clearly, 640k is good enough for you.

  • And along comes Starlink (Score:3)

    by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:30PM (#61215390) Homepage

    I think ATT is going to discover that their attitude and copper infrastructure is going to be a losing combination for those rural customers that can pay for Starlink access and a millstone around their neck for customers that can't and they are mandated to provide subsidized service for.

    • JFC, I was just gonna mention Starlink too. Sure it might have some high latency (maybe) but they could easily steal these rural customers that AT&T will NEVER get back.

      • Starlink latency tends to be 30-60 ms, is that fast enough?
      • AT&T just spent over $23B on 5G spectrum. Their goal is to kill copper and move everyone to cell service, just like it has been for the last 20 years.

        One thing people keep forgetting is that net neutrality in the US had carve-outs for data delivered via wireless means. Killing wired infrastructure and moving to wireless means they can keep many of their monopolistic practices in place while meeting the letter of the law.

        • 5G can't get feasibly/economically get rid of copper unless the towers are high up in the air, like say space. SpaceX Starlink.

  • Translation: "We don't want to use any more of the money we were given to build out broadband to actually build out broadband." I can sort of see their point, why throw more money down the hole of improving customer experience, when you can just not do that and the regulators won't do anything? A 50/10 connection might work for some people now, but it will be inadequate for more people in the future. If they're using typical industry methods, most connections on these lines probably aren't even getting the

  • Then I recommend... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter@@@tedata...net...eg> on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:41PM (#61215438) Journal

    We dissolve and re-regulate AT&T. Or Uncle Sam send them a gigantic invoice.

    Back in the '90s, the Baby Bells promoted an internet-like service called Video Dial Tone [servsig.org]. They promised to replace old copper telephone lines with fiber in exchange for deregulation, tax breaks, increased profit margins, and the ability to sell a-la-carte services, including call waiting, call forwarding, and Caller ID. Pacific Bell alone promised five million homes connected via fiber by the year 2000. [nytimes.com] To date, hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars have gone to present-day companies AT&T, CenturyLink, and Verizon [newnetworks.com] in exchange for these fiber-to-the-home installations, that never happened. And now they have the nerve to tell us that DSL is good enough.

    So it seems reasonable to either demand our money back, or seize the company.

    • This.

      In any other ordinary commercial setting this would be, at best, breach of contract or, at worst, fraud in the inducement. Unfortunately, people have developed very short memories.

  • Simple solution; muni-fiber (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BLToday ( 1777712 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:45PM (#61215448)

    AT&T/Cox/Comcast don't want to invest in a better network. That's fine. Kill the cable and telecom local monopoly. If they don't want to invest in fiber then let the local government do it.

  • Stop paying these fools and subsidize Starlink instead.

  • AT&T owns this huge 100+ year old copper infrastructure that already goes everywhere, and they want to capitalize on it. Putting in fiber everywhere would make their copper infrastructure pointless. Not just because of internet access, but because VOIP makes conventional phones pointless.

    No wonder they're fighting tooth and nail. This is their entire business.

    It's exactly like a buggy whip manufacturer telling the government that there's no reason for anyone to go faster than 30 miles per hour.

    • Putting in fiber everywhere would make their copper infrastructure pointless.

      Several years ago, AT&T dug up every yard in my neighborhood so they could replace their aging copper cables with...new copper cables! It would have been a golden opportunity to lay fiber, but they didn't take it. I was stunned.

      Recently, the local utility company dug up many yards in order to lay fiber bundles. As it turns out, they're preparing for a public/private partnership where the utility owns and maintains the infrastructure, and private companies run the IPS's.

    • The cost of maintaining that copper network is absurd. They all want to replace as much of it as possible... they just don’t want to use the energy to improve customer experience for today’s needs, so they overload a DSLAM on a telephone pole rather than bring fiber to the customer.

    • Side note, VOIP sucks for reliability when compared to POTS./p>

  • Translation.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lionchild ( 581331 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @07:53PM (#61215472) Journal

    What I really hear AT&T saying is: Actual, real high-speed internet is not for poors. :-(

    Or at least: We don't want to invest the money necessary to allow older neighborhoods to have faster, business-type connections in their homes so they can continue to work from home.

  • AT&T came into the RTP, NC area and offered a welcome respite from the evil monopoly of Time-Warner Cable (TWC). Unfortunately, they slowly degenerated into a moral morass that TWC could only envy. Prices have been going up 10 to 20% a year until this year when they rose 36%. Maybe the thing that bothers me most is that when you call, the hold music is copiously infused with static. But I promised that I would never use TWC again so I'm stuck for now.

    The good news is that the guys from Google Fiber (o

  • Where corporate leaders don't just push the laws to the limit, they write those laws for you. Apparently anything that even vaguely threatens the ability of a company to maintain their profit is unacceptable, and don't dare propose spending taxpayer money on something that a private company could do, that's just dirty old "socialism".

    How is that so much of America is terrified of anything vaguely representing government intervention but are seemingly happy to let corporate interests run their lives?

  • Last mile copper (Score:3, Insightful)

    by anoncoward69 ( 6496862 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @08:09PM (#61215520)
    In theory it's hot horrible, but there is a problem with the last mile copper in the US. Most of it has been neglected for the last 20 years. Last time any of that saw any kind of major upgrades was the late 90's/early 2000's as cable companies upgraded their plants for 2 way, and telcos upgraded for DSL. Telcos/cable companies are not maintaining it anymore, just trying to milk the last drops out of the last 2 decades old investments. Something I never used to see in the past growing up in the 80s/90s, telco/cable cabnets just open to the elements, cable splices just wrapped up in trash bags to keep the elements out. There's no pride in the infrastructure anymore, just leaving it to rot
    • You just described the business model of US corporations: "Let it rot". Take the money and deliver as close to nothing as they can get away with. And you can get away with a lot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )

      telco/cable cabinets just open to the elements, cable splices just wrapped up in trash bags to keep the elements out.

      Where have you seen this?

    • I see open cabinets all over the place along main roads.

  • I get 4x the speed with Comcast for half the price....

  • Losing money (Score:3)

    by Ogive17 ( 691899 ) on Monday March 29, 2021 @08:27PM (#61215586)
    I'm sure AT&T is losing money..

    Wait.. what? The CEO made $22.5mil in 2019 and $21mil in 2020.

    Yeah, improving service to customers is too expensive.

  • My village has roughly 2000 inhabitants. Is in the middle of nowhere and: everyone has fiber, for roughly $12 per month (unlimited, of course).

    • While I miss Thailand (damn Covid), internet was very much hit and miss. It has gotten much better, but even in Bangkok I never got great speeds. On the islands in Surat Thanni it is dramatically worse.

      Chok Di!

  • Will tell you at&t sucks. And he works for them.
  • In other countries, like the one I'm from (uk) a constantly growing bandwidth already above 10Mb up is standard yet in 'murica' where corporations own the government they think they can tell you it's good enough already guys.
  • They are going to eliminate copper in the next couple of years and even rural/low population villages are deploying 1Gbps symmetric fiber.

  • Once you're more than a mile from the exchange, you'll be lucky to get 10Mbps down, much less up.

    DSL supposedly offers 90% coverage, but how much of that gets 10Mbps upload?
    My guess is less than 1%

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