AT&T Bringing $180/Month 5-Gigabit Internet to 70 Cities

[namenotfound]

I literally have ATT fiber buried in my front yard. It runs up the road and terminates 1 mile away in a big box. It was put in during the Obama years as part of the rural broadband effort. I am sure ATT collected some federal funds to put it in. It serves NO one. There are no connections to it.

 

[robertmorris2]

I've got the 2gb plan. Just 10 more dollars than the 1gbplan. My wifi download speeds exceed 600bps all over the house.https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/393638897
I think it's worth it. It comes with a wifi extender too when you upgrade to 2gb.

 

[anshuvorty]

Simply put: imagine Time Machine totally on the cloud. That is becoming possible with internet that is faster than your hard drive speed.

Speeds this fast are not meant for content consumption but are great for file transfers. Imagine your entire machine being able to backup to the cloud in less time than it takes for you to do a Time Machine backup. Then, if you have a drive failure, it would take only minutes to download a full TB of data.

As internet speeds in the US grow, we will see a fall in dependency on physical drive space as we can actually work directly from the cloud.

As a video editor, serious speeds of 5gb or more makes cloud based editing possible which could save me tens of thousands of dollars for high end raid SSDs.

You get it!

 

[August West]

I'd be interested in this if it were available in my area but unfortunately there are no broadband providers for me or my neighbors. Guess I'll be stuck with $45/mo for 5~15Mbps for the foreseeable future

 

[EdT]

I don’t live THAT far from a bigger city but I live far enough. I don’t have reliable cell phone service let alone access to 4G wireless. Hi Speed wireless will probably happen in my area eventually but eventually could be 10 years or more. And if you go farther north or farther west it will likely be even longer. Way too few people per mile and not even that many highways and travelers.

 

[UltimaKilo]

I've been fortunate enough to have AT&T Fiber at my current home for the last 4 years. Its easily the best product AT&T has at the moment. I have the entire house wired for ethernet, and any device that can be hard wired to the network, is wired in. Both my wife and I work from home, and I work in the design/media space, so fast connectivity is crucial for what I do. I am currently paying $100 a month for the 1gbps and its fantastic. I am not sure I can justify the 5gbps speed, but the extra $10 to double my speed is a no brainer.

I’m on the same boat. The extra $20 a month to double my speeds seems worth it, but I’ll probably hold out until wifi 7 routers become available.

 

[SactoGuy18]

That's great, but the issue now (in my opinion!) of any home Internet service over 250 mbps download speed is the limit of the web server systems. No wonder Amazon Web Services makes a lot of money hosting the likes of Twitter, parts of Apple's online services, and several others.

 

[gugy]

It depends on the part of the city, and they’re adding more areas from time to time.

I’m in San Diego and on AT&T’s 1gbps fiber, and it’s fabulous. No, I don’t need 1gbps downloads (much less 2gbps or 5gbps), but its worth it because:

• I never have to worry about download speeds, it’s just not an issue any more. Everything transfers basically instantly. Even large PS5 games only take a few minutes.
• It’s a symmetric connection, 940mbps down and up, where my previous was 100mbps down / 10mbps up (symmetric makes online backup much more reasonable).
• There’s no cap on how much you transfer (the old cable service had a cap - I never hit it, but came close on occasion and had to keep it in mind).
• I get 4ms ping times to the machines in the office.
• The old above-ground cable lines had weather-related problems once in a while, while the shiny new fiber lines are super reliable.
• It was about the same price as the old cable service (it was considerably cheaper with the introductory price for the first year, now it’s… I think still a few dollars less - and comes with HBO Max bundled in, lowering the effective price a bit more).

I don’t see myself having any interest in the 2- or 5-gbps service, but fiber is really nice. Anyway, if you’re in San Diego, I’d say, go check their website every month or so and see when it shows up in your area.

Yep, I would love to switch but the service hasn’t come to La Jolla yet. The only thing ATT offers is a 50mbps service but my Spectrum is 200.
Spectrum seems to have the monopoly around this area.

 

[bboyce2009]

Could they maybe improve the coverage of 1gig internet inn the cities they brag about? My city is listed and the 1gig fiber is isolated to one block, and they’re likely to be the ones that get access to this. An AT&T technician once told me that as long as they service 1 house in any given zip code, they are allowed to say they offer that service in that particular city…

 

[827538]

What’s the upload speed on these? A lot of people working from home on Zoom, perhaps 2 per household with HD face cams, it can be tough if you don’t have 50+ Mbps up. They are advertising symmetrical speeds, but I’m in the center of SF and all I can get is 18Mbs tops from AT&T (LIES about fiber). In the meantime I’m stuck with Comcast/Xfinity 1 Gbs for $132 per month.View attachment 1949082

That's DSL, this article is specifically about fiber.

 

[AFDoc]

Colorado needs another high speed option as Xfinity is WAY over priced... But if you want 1 gig that's all there is at least in my area.

 

[richardsonrs]

It is indeed total BS. The northeastern US is like England or Holland for population density; the midwest and mid-south and Pacific Coast like France or Spain. It's not as though we're asking for multi-gigabit fiber to hit every farmstead in eastern Wyoming, though paradoxically folks like that are now getting very solid wireless service in many cases.

And many of the deficiencies are in major cities. I'm in a dense Chicago lakefront neighborhood, and AT&T long ago gave up serving the neighborhood; they max out at 1.5 megabits. It's Comcast xfinity, with horrible billing policies and extremely variable service and outages galore, or else T-Mobile home wireless with the latency issues that come with trying to multiplex 4G and 5G channels. Them's your options. Google Fiber is finally sniffing around the area and we're looking into getting them into our building and it can't come quickly enough as far as I'm concerned. This latest AT&T thing? A gimmick until they simply provide service, any service, to, you know, their service area.

Northern Scandinavia is more sparsely populated than most parts of the US and you know what? It has great internet service, landline or wireless.

This excuse of America's land area? It's surrender-ism. Pure and simple.

I deal with this literally daily. There are so many variables the customer has no clue about. City, state, county permits. Rights of way. Prescriptive rights of way, Hoa’s, exclusive rights, in or out of franchise agreements. They may be able to get fiber physically to your neighborhood but it’s not always the cheapest or best option at the time. If your neighborhood is all buried then it’s not low hanging fruit. It will happen just not first. So. Many. Variables.

 

[jhwalker]

I live in Dallas, but the top AT&T Fiber speed in my area is 50Mbps :/ I'd GLADLY pay for RELIABLE fiber-based Internet service at 5Gbps, just need AT&T to expand their area a bit

 

[MisterSavage]

I'm really confused by the list of cities. There are some smaller cities that I never would have expected to see and some larger cities that I wouldn't have thought would be excluded.

 

[Beyo]

I live in Tulsa, OK. Basically our only fast choice is Cox.

In Oklahoma there is probbaly more cows than people living

 

[Anaron]

It's okay if you don't understand it. Those of us who do will happily upgrade when available.

I'm soon to get a 10G router, a 10G switch, an 802.11ax WiFi access point, and a few 10G PCI-e NICs for some desktops, essentially upgrading my infrastructure to support 10G. This will allow my servers and PCs to communicate/transfer data even faster, and will allow my UnRAID server to serve more, and faster. Then when I have the upgraded FTTH from AT&T, I'll be able to support more and faster connections (inbound and outbound) from my home without any issues.

Also, 802.11ax has a theoretical maximum of close to 10G. Of course, nothing in reality will see those speeds on any existing wifi devices any time soon, but that's irrelevant to people who are interested in such things.

It's okay if these speeds aren't for you. They don't have to be. But it doesn't make it any less relevant for the rest of us.

Exactly. Progress is almost always a good thing and with enough competition, prices can go down considerably. Gigabit internet is far more common now and it used to be very expensive within the last 10 years alone.

Also, hardware will eventually catch up. 2.5 Gbps ports are replacing gigabit ones in motherboards, Wi-Fi standards are improving throughput and file sizes are increasing.

 

[tagmut]

I've got the 2gb plan. Just 10 more dollars than the 1gbplan. My wifi download speeds exceed 600bps all over the house.https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/393638897
I think it's worth it. It comes with a wifi extender too when you upgrade to 2gb.

I just talked to ATT and they are not offering a free extender with an upgrade to the 2GB plan. Wondering how you got that?

 

[killawat]

I'm really confused by the list of cities. There are some smaller cities that I never would have expected to see and some larger cities that I wouldn't have thought would be excluded.

It has more to do with how the infrastructure in those cities were deployed. There are at least two ways to bring FTTH, so carriers may have used one method in one city and tweaked it for the next deployment. So a deployment that is ready for 1 Gbps connections might not be suitable for 2 and 5 Gbps connectivity. Fortunately its incredibly easy to upgrade. The guys over at dslreports.com do a fantastic job of breaking this down, especially the att fiber forums.

 

[aka777]

I'm happy for the ten people who will be able to take advantage of this.

I'll keep rockin' service from Google Fiber w/ no issues.

A little ironic here.

Had the 1Gbps service for awhile, but since we use nearly everything on WiFi it was a waste of money.

Same deal for me via Fios.

 

[MacBH928]

I'm someone who has done a lot of networking related engineering and used dedicated lines from 25Gb/s to 100Gb/s, and installed OS2 fiber and used QSFP28 transceivers etc. Personally I'm in the same boat, I'm thinking of downgrading from 1Gb as while it's great for the occasional Steam game, I'm never using it.

200Mb-300Mb symmetrical (very important) is all I need for 4K HDR streaming, gaming, downloads. In the future I might go back to 1Gb or more but what's the point in paying extra for something I never use? Waiting a couple extra minutes to download a Steam game occasionally isn't worth the extra $300/yr. It's just my wife and I using the internet and even if we are both watching 4K HDR streams, as well as our child watching Disney+, and we are web browsing and gaming, that's still less than 200Mb of bandwidth. I think good upload speeds are starting to become more and more important due to cloud storage, home security cameras etc.

Same thing happened with my phone plan. I was only using a couple GB's of data a month, maybe 10GB at the extreme end as 98% of my usage is over WiFi.

I agree but $300/m is just $25 a month and for internet its more than worth it, but only if you use it. Between 2 people and a child, yeah maybe the $300 is more worth it for you.

Hey if you know a thing or two about networking do you mind if I ask you a few questions out of topic?

Speeds are symmetrical.

Even 1080P Zoom/Facetime doesn't require much bandwidth. A 4K HDR Netflix or YouTube stream is ~25Mb/s so you can kind of figure out how much you need from there.

I find this comment ironically funny and hurtful at the same time, as someone who used to wait for video to load on youtube. In fact I lived in a time where it took like 40min to download an mp3 song.

 

[MacBH928]

Exactly. People here saying "work from home" people could use this? Really? What "work" are you doing that needs 2-5Gbps internet? Realizing you need that speed at BOTH ends, it seems unlikely. Maybe 1:1000000 people would have that scenario.

Basically, it's bragging rights. Having that much bandwidth might help congestion at peak period for the 99.9% of people. Who knows. But almost no ones home networks are wired for more that Gigabit.

Yeah, but people who work in large file sizes will benefit from . Backing up 4K video is crazy big, but yeah, those who work on excel and email don't need 1gbps.

I never imagined I will be in a position to ever say, I do not need faster internet.... historical event for me.

Curious how $12/subscriber pays for workers, maintenance, build-out, upgrades, etc? Seems like at that rate, the telecom's would be losing money.

I guess power in numbers, 50m subscribers *$12*12 moths = $7.2 billion... that should cover it.

 

[Rychiar]

What's the point of these? No WiFi can transport this kind of data. And who needs this for workstation-at-home work?

Who doesn’t need this for work from home? Every designer who’s sending multigig psd files back and forth would love it… which I imagine is a large part of the audience here… and most of us have wired workstations… plus upcoming Wi-Fi standards will support it fine

 

[max2]

Who doesn’t need this for work from home? Every designer who’s sending multigig psd files back and forth would love it… which I imagine is a large part of the audience here… and most of us have wired workstations… plus upcoming Wi-Fi standards will support it fine

Exactly.

 

[max2]

I've got the 2gb plan. Just 10 more dollars than the 1gbplan. My wifi download speeds exceed 600bps all over the house.https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/d/393638897
I think it's worth it. It comes with a wifi extender too when you upgrade to 2gb.

Awesome.

 

[max2]

The funny thing about this is where we moved from where houses were from 1950s or 1960s just got AT&T Fiber (didn't have it during the time we moved) and now have the two new tiers of 2 Gbps and 5 Gbps.

The new house and location we moved to only has 1 Gbps tier but it is still fiber.

Do I really care. Not really.

I just thought it was interesting.

It would be nice to have 2 Gbps for a extra buffer/room but is it worth $70 more a month ? No.

We got a deal and pay $40 a month for 1 Gbps.