AT&T (NYSE: T) is putting its fiber installation workers to the task, announcing expansions of its fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) services for residential and business customers in eight markets in the Midwest, South and West.

On the residential front, AT&T is bringing its GigaPower service to additional homes, apartments and small businesses in parts of Atlanta, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Kansas, and Oklahoma City.

While it did not reveal any specific plans about new markets, AT&T said in a release that it plans to light the service in additional markets this year.

"We'll continue to expand our 100 percent fiber AT&T GigaPower network to additional locations," AT&T said. "We're planning to triple availability by the end of 2016."

Business customers are also reaping the rewards of the latest network FTTP expansion effort.

Leveraging the same GPON infrastructure it uses for the residential market, AT&T is extending the 1 Gbps FTTP service option to businesses located in its Fiber Ready buildings to four existing markets -- including San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, and Miami.

After reaching its goal to bring fiber bring fiber to 1 million business locations in its wireline territory, the service provider previously told FierceTelecom that the next priorities for FTTP in the business segment growth will be driven by its on-demand Ethernet service and GPON-based products.

"When we extend that PON architecture, we're also working on making our business products available to take advantage of that PON architecture just like our broadband services do," said Matt Beattie, executive director of product marketing for fiber to the building at AT&T. "Today, when we roll out PON, we can serve small businesses with a high speed broadband product and making our enterprise-grade services able to use that fiber architecture we already deployed."



These latest expansions are part of AT&T's broader effort it launched in December 2015 to build out service to parts of 38 additional metro areas. The 1 Gbps service is already up and running in over 21 metros. Upon completion of the latest build initiative, the service provider will double the amount of metro areas it serves to a total of 56.

To achieve the deployment scale, AT&T is taking a leverage-and-extend approach to its FTTP build. The provider plans to extend fiber from its existing fiber-to-the-node infrastructure for its U-verse broadband service to make those network builds FTTP capable.

For more:

- see this business fiber release

- and this release