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AT&T Fiber announces 11 more areas that are to benefit from their high speed Internet services.
Beacon Transcript – With 29 metro areas across the U.S. already enjoying their services, AT&T has announced a number of 11 more areas that will benefit from its AT&T Fiber services, with 27 more being slated for a possible future release.
The 11 more metro areas to receive the service will be as follows: Florida’s Gainesville and Panama City; Texas’s Corpus Christi; North Carolina’s Wilmington; Columbus, Georgia; Central Kentucky; Louisiana’s Lafayette; Biloxi-Gulfport, Northeast Mississippi, and Mississippi; Tennessee, Knoxville and Southeaster Tennessee.
Although the new metro areas have been announced, it is as yet unclear when they will start receiving service. AT&T declared that sometime around the end of the year a number of 45 metro areas will have had service deployed, 29 of which are already receiving service. This leaves an open guess in regards to the 11 new areas that are mostly believed to start to receive service sometime in 2017.
Even if new fiber connections are being installed in cities, that does not guarantee a faster Internet service as the new connections will not be spread throughout the whole of the metro space. The faster service is, at the moment, available to over 3 million users spread throughout homes and small businesses. Still, the majority of those residing in the AT&T’s 21-state wireline are and will continue to use the DSL line, a slower type of connection.
As one of the requirements imposed by the Federal Communication Commission after AT&T bought DirecTV was to equip each metro area with fiber, the company declares that their plan to meet the 12.5 million required mark clientele is up on its way and should be reached sometimes around the middle of 2019.
Together with the name change from Internet “GigaPower” to its current Fiber, AT&T is planning to release a series of new products and network technologies. Also, it is planning to phase out its U-verse brand and change it to AT&T Internet in a rebranding of their non-fiber services.
A new, self-imposed development will also feature the end of their ads program. The service, which has generated debates over its practices of scanning its user Web browsing so as to send personalized ads, will be stopped and the benefits it proposed (the lowest cost in fiber Internet) will be offered automatically to users at the lowest available price.
As Google Fiber does not operate in the respective zones, the 11 more areas announced by AT&T Fiber have an as yet unannounced price, and as it is a well-known fact that internet costs are area dependent, an estimate is hard to guess.
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