Dallas is AT&T’s home turf. It’s cable market is also dominated by Time Warner Cable. But the thought of that cable/Internet business being swallowed up by Comcast if its merger with TWC goes through was apparently enough to get AT&T to decide to roll out gigabit fiber service to the Texas town.

Calling the proposed Comcast/TWC merger “an industry redefining deal,” AT&T CEO Randall “Darth Randy” Stephenson announced at a Morgan Stanley conference on Thursday that the threat of the combined megacompany has given him reason to hasten the expansion of both AT&T’s fiber offerings and its wireless LTE network.

“We are redirecting VIP investment to fiber-to-the-home deployment,” said Stephenson, “and in fact we are going to launch the service in Dallas this summer.”

AT&T recently began rolling out fiber service in Austin at the same time as Google begins deployment of its fiber network in the Texas capital (and Time Warner Cable fights to retain customers by boosting speeds).

Stephenson also said his company is going to be a “little more aggressive and assertive in deploying that technology around the country,” implying that AT&T fiber service will soon begin popping up in other cities, presumably metro areas where it is already the primary provider of landline phone service.

As for Stephenson’s prediction of whether or not regulators will approve the Comcast/TWC deal, the Sith lord declared that, “It probably gets done, and it’s probably going to have some hair on the transaction.”

Of course, this is the same guy who predicted his company’s $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA would sail through the regulatory gauntlet, only to see both the FCC and Justice Dept. shoot it down, costing AT&T $4 billion in cash and spectrum.

AT&T To Bring 1 Gbps ‘GigaPower’ To Dallas [DSLreports.com]

Comcast Has AT&T Worrying About the US [Corporate Intelligence]