91–96 of 96 posts
I don't understand AT&Ts strategy here. I assume the vast majority of AT&Ts network is overhead, and it is not expensive in the scheme of things to run PON fibre on the poles. They are effectively giving away ~50% of their footprint to competitors, forever to avoid a one time capex cost. Obviously there is going to be a portion of their network which is completely uneconomic to serve (requiring huge fibre runs for a…
My top desire is that the FCC go back and do what Congress actually asked for in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, to make fiber and hybrid loops part of the require unbundled network elements offerings. This infrastructure is so heavily subsidized. The FCC in 2002/2003, with some prompting from the courts, allowed fiber to be effectively an monopoly offering. Contrary to the law that Congress had passed! > Elimina…
Even if they were taken over tomorrow by leadership that weren't crooks, they're already in a terrible position to compete as it is -- in the 20 years since they did anything, Comcast and the others have gone from the ~10Mbps connections they once offered, to 1 and even 2Gbps in many places, so I assume in nearly all the areas AT&T doesn't serve with fiber, the incumbent cable co has about 95% market share already. Tough to break into that. even though customers hate the cable companies, they know AT&T is just as slimy -- and nobody wants to set aside a day to wait for an internet installer.
What this tells me is that industries with limited growth potential and who are focused on incremental rather than transformative technology do not respond to government carrots, and to the extent that they do anything, it is to arrange scenarios where they privatize the carrots and socialize the costs. There is no return on investment for investments in rural fiber. Infrastructure needs a high density of users to be…
Problem is that we live in an environment where a company like AT&T can lobby for basically anything they want, and have basically no accountability when they don't meet their obligations. You even have people telling stories where they could get fiber service, but the provider just doesn't want to.
And they got their incoming president who will run the country like a business and let them carry on doing nothing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not an issue of what companies to trust. The issue is trusting them at all. Ideally this sort of thing should be a public work. Operators can be private but shared infrastructure should be publicly owned seeing as we're paying for it. But if markets have to be involved...If we're willing to pay $X per customer we should give the tax subsidy to them. The market can sort out who is actually willing to get the work…
Yes, I have no idea how, in 2024 , internet service is not considered a basic utility like power and water, and regulated as such. My parents paid ~ $65 / mo for 6mb dsl for ages. They had constant outages, and ATT always stonewalled the repairs. Talking to the repair guy, he admitted that ATT basically hated supporting that DSL, and wished all their rural customers would go elsewhere. He even told them that if they…
I recall in 2005 in a major west coast city, having 6Mbps DSL service but it was very prone to disruption. The tech they would send out would be just trying different pairs from a big fat cable to see if he could find one that was not too deteriorated from age. Even two decades ago AT&T's infrastructure was falling apart, and again, this was in a major city everyone in the world has heard of. Even then, they didn't care enough to even fix their 50-year old copper (which is now 70 years old) let alone lay fiber. Meanwhile also in 2005 on the other side of the continent, FiOS was launched.
Is AT&T still around? Bell Labs is a long-faded memory at this point.
Wasn't Bell Labs a result of ATT's natural, sanctioned monopoly?
Today they're just operating with the most cynical approach, where they extract the maximum amount of value out of a network built by our grandfathers' generation, only doing capex in the most targeted areas where the ROI will be instantaneous. (new subdivisions, and specifically ones where they can get the HOA to bake in their services to the HOA fee). I used to live in a large urban tower and AT&T did finally come in with fiber, in 2017, on that condition. They'll be cash flow positive from Day 1 because 100% of the homes in that tower are customers, and they literally can't cancel their service (or more specifically their payment).