From 1.5 Mbps to 1 Gbps: AT&T Slowly Upgrades the Southeast It’s 2017 and your Internet connection maxes out at 1.5mbps. Sounds like a third- world country, right? Well, that’s been the reality for millions of AT&T customers in areas formerly under the auspice of Bellsouth for the better part of the last decade. SBC acquired BellSouth a little more than a decade ago, and the company's lagging upgrade pace has been a point of contention for the lion's share of that time. When the U-verse product launched in the mid-2000s, traditional copper customers were upgraded while customers under the Fiber-to-the-curb systems were left behind. Ironically, in this case, sometimes it benefited to have an older home with older utilities that weren’t on the FTTC system. An Experiment Fails Amidst the housing boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Bellsouth launched an innovative fiber-to-the-curb system for many new developments throughout the southeast. This system used a few different network topologies: IFITL, DFITL, and DISC*S MX, manufactured by Marconi. Fiber was run to neighborhood pedestals located reasonably close to homes, followed by a copper line to the home. While this seems pretty ingenious on the surface, the equipment was fairly proprietary, and left little room for upgrade. Many customers could never sign up for the same speed tiers as their copper counterparts, and eventually were capped at 1.5mbps. Light on the Horizon In late 2014, AT&T announced an ambitious goal for its nationwide footprint: upgrade select markets to Gigapower (now known as AT&T Fiber), a 1000mbps (1gbps) connection over fiber to the premises. Naturally, the first targets were the low hanging fruit: communities that already had fiber to the premises, as well as MDUs where the cost to run fiber lines is significantly less.

The big question: would the antiquated FTTC technology finally be upgraded to GPON infrastructure? The answer: yes. The process involves running conduit through the existing right-of-way to add additional handholes for fiber optic cable drop lines. In at least some neighborhoods, additional backhaul capacity is added. New pedestal enclosures are added next to the existing neighborhood Optical Network Unit pedestals to house fiber splitters. According to AT&T, the following markets have existing and ongoing conversions of FTTC to GPON: • Alabama: Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile • Florida: Ft. Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Miami, Orlando, West Palm Beach • Georgia: Atlanta, Augusta • Kentucky: Louisville • Louisiana: Baton Rouge, New Orleans and Shreveport-Bossier • Mississippi: Jackson • North Carolina: Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh-Durham, Winston-Salem • South Carolina: Charleston, Columbia, Greenville • Tennessee: Knoxville, Memphis and Nashville In the Jacksonville, Florida market alone, more than 100,000 customers now have access to AT&T Internet 1000, according to AT&T. While AT&T said they do not provide a breakdown between wireline and wireless infrastructure investment, a company spokesperson told DSLReports.com that they invested $200 million between 2013 and 2015 in the Jacksonville market. Nationally, AT&T said they have invested $135 billion between capital improvements and acquisitions. More Work to Do AT&T’s stated goal to DSLReports.com is that they’d like to reach as many customers as possible with these conversions. Specifically, the company has a goal of reaching nearly 13 million customers with availability by mid-2019. According to AT&T, they’re only about a third of the way to their goal. Currently, 4 million customers can access AT&T’s fastest fiber offerings. If you’re still in an area not upgraded to the GPON platform, there is a way you can try to make some progress. AT&T encourages interested neighborhoods to contact their local community leaders, who are assigned an AT&T external affairs representative. This article was contributed by the DSLReports.com community. If you'd like to receive payment for writing content like this for our front page, please drop us a line.







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Most recommended from 47 comments



Anon7199c

@hcs.net 7 recommendations Anon7199c Anon GPON upgrades A lot of South Florida xFITL customers got upgraded to GPON, but there are still plenty of subdivisions that are still on the old platform or on FTTN VDSL2. But the OP hit the nail right square on the head. IFITL/DFITL customers got shafted for over a decade while ADSL customers were eventually upgraded to newer and greater technologies, namely FTTN U-Verse. I think this caused a lot of people to abandon AT&T and go to the cable company (Comcast in this case) for faster speeds. No one in their right mind would pay $40+/mo for 1.5 Mbps in the year 2017. I guess AT&T finally got the clear message that they needed to upgrade these customers to 21st century technology in order to regain their business. Sad to say, if it weren't for Comcast (or any other cable ISP), many of these customers would be stuck with 1.5 Mbps. You can't even Netflix on 1.5 Mbps.

StuckOnVZDSL

join:2015-02-26

Pittsfield, PA 5 recommendations StuckOnVZDSL Member Not just AT&T Verizon here in PA has done the same thing, only worse. At least AT&T built some sort of infrastructure for higher speeds, Verizon is still running most of us on antiquated copper, with no hope of upgrade and no alternative.

train_wreck

slow this bird down

join:2013-10-04

Antioch, TN Cisco ASA 5506

Cisco DPC3939

3 recommendations train_wreck Member Same story Like many others here, my only option was either 6mbps AT&T DSL or Comcast for many years, and both choices were horribly unreliable in the neighborhood. When Google Fiber began building out in the city, AT&T took a span of about 3 weeks to wire our entire subdivision with fiber and within a month later I had the service installed/activated.



Funny how fast they can move when there's competition, and how deathly slow they can move when there isn't. I went through years of monthly Comcast problems, and my neighbors on AT&T did the same.