You may have gotten excited on Monday when you saw AT&T’s announcement that it was considering bringing gigabit Internet service to 100 cities, with Houston being on the list. So far, the only city that actually has AT&T’s GigaPower service is Austin, and there the service is “only” operating at 300 Mbps speeds, with the promise of a free upgrade later this year to full 1,000 Mbps downloads.

The expansion that might or might not include Houston and surrounding municipalities has two big caveats. From the news release AT&T issued Monday:

“We’re delivering advanced services that offer consumers and small businesses the ability to do more, faster, help communities create a new wave of innovation, and encourage economic development,” said Lori Lee, senior executive vice president, AT&T Home Solutions. “We’re interested in working with communities that appreciate the value of the most advanced technologies and are willing to encourage investment by offering solid investment cases and policies.”

And . . .

This expanded fiber build is not expected to impact AT&T’s capital investment plans for 2014.

In other words, AT&T wants cities and counties to make it easier to expand its network. Laying fiber across big metropolitan areas is an expensive and time-consuming proposition, and AT&T wants a little help.

And AT&T isn’t expected to start spending big dollars on the effort this year. Upgrading to gigabit fiber is indeed a capital expense, so don’t hold your breath waiting for it, or you’ll be blue in the face until sometime next year, at the earliest.

Exactly what might AT&T want cities to do? In making its announcement, AT&T is following in the footsteps of Google, which unveiled plans in February to bring its Google Fiber network to 34 cities, with Houston not included. Google’s plans are laden with conditions:

We aim to provide updates by the end of the year about which cities will be getting Google Fiber. Between now and then, we’ll work closely with each city’s leaders on a joint planning process that will not only map out a Google Fiber network in detail, but also assess what unique local challenges we might face. These are such big jobs that advance planning goes a long way toward helping us stick to schedules and minimize disruption for residents. We’re going to work on a detailed study of local factors that could affect construction, like topography (e.g., hills, flood zones), housing density and the condition of local infrastructure. Meanwhile, cities will complete a checklist of items that will help them get ready for a project of this scale and speed. For example, they’ll provide us with maps of existing conduit, water, gas and electricity lines so that we can plan where to place fiber. They’ll also help us find ways to access existing infrastructure—like utility poles—so we don’t unnecessarily dig up streets or have to put up a new pole next to an existing one.

You can expect AT&T’s wish list to be very similar.

So, while Houston is one of AT&T’s candidate cities, GigaPower Internet service may not ever make it here. In fact, Karl Bode at DSLReports.com calls AT&T’s announcement a “big fat bluff”:

Before you get too excited, you need to understand that this is a bluff of immense proportion. It’s what I affectionately refer to as “fiber to the press release.” Ever since Google Fiber came on the scene, AT&T’s response has been highly theatrical in nature. What AT&T would have the press and public believe is that they’re engaged in a massive new deployment of fiber to the home service. What’s actually happening is that AT&T is upgrading a few high-end developments where fiber was already in the ground (these users were previously capped at DSL speeds) and pretending it’s a serious expansion of fixed-line broadband. It’s not. At the same time AT&T is promising a massive expansion in fixed line broadband, they’re telling investors they aren’t spending much money on the initiative, because they aren’t. AT&T’s focus is on more profitable wireless. “Gigapower” is a show pony designed to help the company pretend they’re not being outmaneuvered in their core business by a search engine company.

The ball is in the court of the 100 municipalities on the list. Will the city of Houston opt to play? Certainly, Houston didn’t leap into the game when Google asked cities to compete for the initial Google Fiber builds. Will an invitation from AT&T be more enticing?

Related: AT&T says it will work with the Chernin Group investment firm to create a streaming video service that would compete with Hulu and Netflix.