AT&T recently named 100 municipalities in 21 metropolitan areas where it might bring its fiber-to-the-home network, without actually saying how many customers would get the GigaPower service, which offers up to 1Gbps download speeds. AT&T said the expansion "is not expected to impact AT&T’s capital investment plans for 2014," further muddying the picture.

That fiber announcement came a few weeks before AT&T announced a deal to buy satellite provider DirecTV for $48.5 billion. Yet it seems the two are intertwined: AT&T told the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday that it needs approval of the DirecTV merger in order to bring fiber to 2 million locations.

"The economics of this transaction will allow the combined company to upgrade 2 million additional locations to high speed broadband with GigaPower FTTP (fiber to the premise) and expand our high speed broadband footprint to an additional 13 million locations where AT&T will be able to offer a pay TV and high speed broadband bundle," AT&T said in an SEC filing.

We've asked AT&T how many customers will get fiber if the deal isn't approved, but the company declined to comment.

The expansions would happen within four years, AT&T said, as combining the companies will let AT&T gain "cost synergies" of more than $1.6 billion a year within three years. The savings would largely be due to lower programming costs from increasing AT&T's size and bargaining power.

Overall, a combined AT&T and DirecTV would be able to offer "a pay TV, broadband, and mobile service bundle to at least 70 million customer locations" and "a pay TV and wireless service bundle to approximately another 45 million U.S. customer locations."

AT&T's filing noted that DirecTV does not offer a broadband service. The wireless Internet and TV bundles AT&T plans for after the DirecTV merger would apparently rely on LTE for broadband and satellite for video. "We expect fixed wireless broadband to provide speeds of 10-15 Mbps during peak periods with even higher maximum speeds during off peak times," AT&T said.

It's not really an expansion of AT&T's fixed wireless plans, since AT&T already offers home Internet service over its cellular network. Back in 2012, AT&T said that "99 percent of customer locations in wireline service area[s] [are] expected to have high-speed IP Internet access via IP wireline and/or 4G LTE" by the end of 2014."

Karl Bode of DSLReports wrote today that "AT&T had just never publicly stated how many homes would get GigaPower in the first place, though target locations are going to primarily be high-end development complexes where fiber is already in the ground... Bumping speeds in locations where fiber is already deployed doesn't bump CAPEX, and neither does offering fixed LTE service in locations already slated to have LTE... In other words, AT&T is pretending that mostly wireless upgrades they already planned to make (or have made already) are new deployments that will only come if the DirecTV deal is approved."

AT&T seems confident that the merger will be approved, saying, "The deal offers tremendous consumer benefits," particularly "in rural areas [that have] few, if any, high-speed broadband choices today."

Buying DirecTV would also help AT&T counter Comcast's planned acquisition of Time Warner Cable. Comcast has 22.6 million pay-TV subscribers to AT&T's 11 million, while Time Warner has 11.4 million TV subscribers and DirecTV has 20.3 million, according to Leichtman Research Group.

The gap between Comcast and AT&T is closer in broadband Internet service, with Comcast having 21.1 million subscribers to AT&T's 16.5 million.