AT&T Launches 5-Gigabit Internet in 70 Cities, Costs $180/Month

[Tsing]

Image: AT&T



AT&T has launched two new multi-gig internet speed tiers for 70 metro areas, enabling speeds of up to 5 gigs for nearly 5.2 million customers.



Dubbed Hyper-Gig, the new plans comprise 2 gig speed and 5 gig speed AT&T Fiber tiers that cost $110 and $180 per month, respectively. The full list of multi-gig metros, which include L.A. Atlanta, and Dallas, can be found here. Both plans include a subscription to AT&T and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max streaming service.



The new plans, per AT&T:



AT&T Fiber 2 GIG: $110/month + taxes; AT&T Business Fiber 2 GIG: $225/month + taxes



Designed for the powerfully interconnected home or small business, our 2-Gig service provides customers with equal upload and download speeds and a strong, reliable connection. With the ability...

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[Brian_B]

Bet this upgrades 0 people from DSL...

 

[LazyGamer]

Well, THAT, and first you have to be unfortunate enough to have AT&T as your ISP.

 

[Riccochet]

Bet this upgrades 0 people from DSL...

StarLink has pretty much put all the nails in the coffin of ISP's developing outside of major metro's. They have no interest in spending 10's of millions laying copper/fiber to service a handful of people.

That's according to my brother who leads the backbone engineering department for a major ISP.

 

[Dan_D]

I've got a friend that works at AT&T. Evidently, it's being offered only in new neighborhoods where all of the infrastructure is brand new, or certain areas that already have fiber that have been upgraded sufficiently to support it.

Supposedly, Frontier is looking to offer 2.5Gbps in my neighborhood. It was a mere 300mbps when I moved into this neighborhood, but it was always fiber here.

 

[Brian_B]

StarLink has pretty much put all the nails in the coffin of ISP's developing outside of major metro's. They have no interest in spending 10's of millions laying copper/fiber to service a handful of people.

That's according to my brother who leads the backbone engineering department for a major ISP.

We have two local phone companies nearby. They do not overlap territory, so it isn’t like you get your choice, just I happen to live near the boundary. Both are small and only serve their territory.

Before I got starlink - one of those was it. I did have DSL - 12M service that sometimes saw 6.5 or 7, and went down every morning like clockwork for 30min maintenance. But it did stay up during storms; this company buried most of their lines. The other company has some fiber laid (they have a small town of about 12k population and a handful of very popular tourist resorts).

Both of those companies just got rather large amounts of funding from the latest Infrastructure Bill; one got $18M, the other $40M, specifically for running fiber to the home.

Now, I realize that’s no where near the amount of money for everyone in those territories to get fiber. We are a geographically large and mainly rural area. The schools will probably get fiber, and anyone that happens to live along that path probably will be lucky and get it as well, and the money will probably run out there.

Apart from those two phone companies, there is Hughsnet, and some locations can use Verizon (it’s the only cellular with halfway decent coverage), but the available plans here are pricey when I last looked.

But there are still ISPs out there; Starlink is definitely nice but I’d jump to fiber in a heartbeat. As starlink says “It’s better than nothing”. I admit though, had it not been for taxpayer funding via the infrastructure bill, those two companies don’t have a lot of revenue or profit to really be able to roll out projects like that

 

[Riccochet]

We have two local phone companies nearby. They do not overlap territory, so it isn’t like you get your choice, just I happen to live near the boundary. Both are small and only serve their territory.

Before I got starlink - one of those was it. I did have DSL - 12M service that sometimes saw 6.5 or 7, and went down every morning like clockwork for 30min maintenance. But it did stay up during storms; this company buried most of their lines. The other company has some fiber laid (they have a small town of about 12k population and a handful of very popular tourist resorts).

Both of those companies just got rather large amounts of funding from the latest Infrastructure Bill; one got $18M, the other $40M, specifically for running fiber to the home.

Now, I realize that’s no where near the amount of money for everyone in those territories to get fiber. We are a geographically large and mainly rural area. The schools will probably get fiber, and anyone that happens to live along that path probably will be lucky and get it as well, and the money will probably run out there.

Apart from those two phone companies, there is Hughsnet, and some locations can use Verizon (it’s the only cellular with halfway decent coverage), but the available plans here are pricey when I last looked.

But there are still ISPs out there; Starlink is definitely nice but I’d jump to fiber in a heartbeat. As starlink says “It’s better than nothing”. I admit though, had it not been for taxpayer funding via the infrastructure bill, those two companies don’t have a lot of revenue or profit to really be able to roll out projects like that

It costs about $350,000 - 500,000 per mile of copper or fiber laid. $10M doesn't go far. Literally.

I was interested in a house in SC a few years ago. Only service there was DSL. A little less than a 1/4 mile up the road was cable service at the pole. They wanted $80,000 to lay cable to that house.

 

[DrezKill]

It costs about $350,000 - 500,000 per mile of copper or fiber laid. $10M doesn't go far. Literally.

I was interested in a house in SC a few years ago. Only service there was DSL. A little less than a 1/4 mile up the road was cable service at the pole. They wanted $80,000 to lay cable to that house.

DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANG

 

[Space_Ranger]

It costs about $350,000 - 500,000 per mile of copper or fiber laid. $10M doesn't go far. Literally.

I was interested in a house in SC a few years ago. Only service there was DSL. A little less than a 1/4 mile up the road was cable service at the pole. They wanted $80,000 to lay cable to that house.

I know that pain, and the pain is real.

 

[LeRoy_Blanchard]

It costs about $350,000 - 500,000 per mile of copper or fiber laid. $10M doesn't go far. Literally.

I was interested in a house in SC a few years ago. Only service there was DSL. A little less than a 1/4 mile up the road was cable service at the pole. They wanted $80,000 to lay cable to that house.

I'll do it for $40k. Be done in a weekend.

 

[Zarathustra]

I'm all for continued improvement in available speeds. Let's just hope these plans aren't castrated by data caps.

AT&T isn't available in my area (we have a choice of Verizon FiOS, Comcast and RCN) but if they were, I'd consider the plan.

I'm not sure I feel the need for more than a gig at this point, but it probably would be tempting.

At the very least it might help to bring down the price of my gigabit plan, just like how Comcast's pricing and plans suddenly improved overnight when FiOS came to town.

 

[Riccochet]

I'm also in no rush to go beyond 1 Gbps due to the cost and effort needed to upgrade my entire network to utilize it.

 

[Brian_B]

Bet this upgrades 0 people from DSL...

My big issue here is that I think it's great that a lot of people have access to good internet. Fantastic even. And I'm all for internet speeds going up.

But here, I strongly suspect it will end up being another case of those with already good internet getting better, and those with crappy access not getting anything. This won't impact someone who already has 1G Fiber very much, but for someone who's still stuck on DSL and this would be a lifechanging event, very literally. And the FCC will see "average" speeds have went up and call it a success for national broadband rollout.

Yes, it's expensive to reach outliers and rural areas. That's why federally-mandated utilities get to charge rural access fees -- those small fees in population-dense areas help to cover getting access out to those rural areas. ISPs have no such thing right now; at least they are getting some help, but it's piecemeal and isn't quite reliable or steady enough to make Broadband access a universal utility or service like I think it should be.

 

[Zarathustra]

I'm also in no rush to go beyond 1 Gbps due to the cost and effort needed to upgrade my entire network to utilize it.

For me, at most, it would be the matter of swapping out a NIC in my pfSense box.

It already has a dual 10gig NIC, which is connected to my main switch with a 10gig DAC cable.

The WAN is connected with the on board Intel gigabit port right now, but one of the two 10gig ports is open.

My options would depend on how the modem is set up. If it uses a 10gig port, either SFP+ or copper, I'm all set. I already have a SFP+ to 10GBaseT adapter that works really well.

If it's a 5gig copper port, it would be trickier, as my old NIC cannot negotiate the new 5gig or 2.5gig modes, so it would fall back to 1gig, unless I can find an SFP+ adapter that can do the 2.5 and 5 gig negitions and then connect to the NIC via 10gig. I have heard of such things, but not sure how good they are.

Worst case what I would need to do is get a new NIC, which would cost a little, but not be the end of the world.

As far as utilizing the speeds on the LAN, I'm not gojg to lie. Most of my clients are hooked up via wired gigabit ethernet, laptops phones and tablets via ac wifi, so none of them are going to be able to come close to taking advantage of it.

That said, my server is hooked up via a 10gig DAC to the main switch, and my workstation, and my test bench setup are both connected using 10gig fiber.

So I'd make some use of it...

 

[LazyGamer]

unless I can find an SFP+ adapter that can do the 2.5 and 5 gig negitions and then connect to the NIC via 10gig. I have heard of such things, but not sure how good they are.

I'm looking for such a thing, as my HPE 10Gbit switch doesn't do 2.5/5 multigig. Also have a few SFP+ ports open on the big switch. Right now I've just been considering a small multigig switch that also has SFP+, but they're currently priced above my impulse buy limit.

Worst case what I would need to do is get a new NIC, which would cost a little, but not be the end of the world.

Multigig NICs are pretty cheap, especially the 2.5Gbase-T ones, talking copper of course. Not even sure SFP+ / fiber is a thing for multigig, as it's more of a consumer and WAP thing and 10Gbit for fiber and SFP+ has been cheap for a decade.

 

[Grimlakin]

We all know people are going to buy this 5 gig internet package and swear it's faster than the 1 gig they had before even though they are on their same old 1 gig router port or worse operating off of the home wifi 5 still. These kinds of users frustrate me.

I got the 5 gig internet but when I download from x I only get 50 megabytes a second.

Well Bob there are many hops between you and where you are downloading from and any one of them being speed constrained will see your download speed for that item limited. But I bet your Netflix never buffers.. oh your TV is 12 years old and only has a crappy wifi to stream with oh and you're still at 1080p. Why did you get this Bob. Oh the salesman told you your family of 4 would cap out you're old 1 gig connection.

Look bob I like you but you need a full tech overhaul that will cost a few grand to bring you a setup thst can actually see 5 gigabit of bandwidth use... when the stars align.

 

[Brian_B]

We all know people are going to buy this 5 gig internet package and swear it's faster than the 1 gig they had before even though they are on their same old 1 gig router port or worse operating off of the home wifi 5 still. These kinds of users frustrate me.

Yeah I'm sure the supplied Rental Router will have a built-in speed test the tech can run to show the service is up to speed; and that will completely bypass any WiFi or internal network issues.

Use your own router, well, then of course the issue is the router. Run a speed test from a client on your network - well obviously it's your network. And the tech will just test with a company router to show the line works fine, so of course you want to go back to leasing your router from the company so you can take advantage of your new speed.

 

[Grimlakin]

Yeah I'm sure the supplied Rental Router will have a built-in speed test the tech can run to show the service is up to speed; and that will completely bypass any WiFi or internal network issues.

Use your own router, well, then of course the issue is the router. Run a speed test from a client on your network - well obviously it's your network. And the tech will just test with a company router to show the line works fine, so of course you want to go back to leasing your router from the company so you can take advantage of your new speed.

This made me curious... what consumer routers today support 5gb connections... lets see shall we.

I'm not finding one. So there will be a consumer market for faster better more expensive routers shortly.

 

[Brian_B]

This made me curious... what consumer routers today support 5gb connections... lets see shall we.

In the case I'm making - it doesn't have to support 5Gb, it just has to have SFP or whatever the fiber interface is. AT&T doesn't actually care if you can use 2Gb or 5Gb, they just have to show they are providing it to your home. They would argue a single device doesn't need that 5Gb; you need the bandwidth to adequately support multiple devices at high speed -- i.e. 5 devices operating at 1Gb.

Interestingly enough, I don't actually use it, but the Starlink provided router does exactly this: It tests your computer to internet, router to internet, and computer to router all separately and from the router - so it can show if the problem is the uplink or the LAN. It also added a new "happy cat" option where you can turn on the snow melting heater even if it isn't snowing outside.

 

[Zarathustra]

It costs about $350,000 - 500,000 per mile of copper or fiber laid. $10M doesn't go far. Literally.

I was interested in a house in SC a few years ago. Only service there was DSL. A little less than a 1/4 mile up the road was cable service at the pole. They wanted $80,000 to lay cable to that house.

I can't help but feel like I could do it cheaper. Much cheaper.

Access to the poles would be the problem.

I mean, seriously, I'd bribe a nearby house inside the service area (maybe with free internet?) to put a unit on their property and run some single mode fiber myself and connect it to 10GBase-SR transceivers on either end. How hard could it be?