No "Fiber to the Home" with AT&T for the Foreseeable Future
By Alexander Grundner |
December 5th, 2006
Comments (3)
Reuters reports that unlike number two communications player, Verizon, AT&T will not lay down fiber-optic cables to everyone’s home. AT&T says it’s quite pleased with its new 25Mbps U-Verse over copper wire technology to deliver high-bandwidth content like downloadable movies and IPTV. What do you think? Smart move on AT&T’s part, or will Verizon eat their lunch once FiOS goes nationwide?
December 5th, 2006 at 10:10 am
Embarq (formerly known as Sprint) has no plans of doing fiber either. They are always calling me and sending me stuff in the mail to try and get me to switch to DSL. I will stick with my faster cable connection until they switch to fiber or something else to match my cable speed.
I will probably be ditching Embarq all together next year for Vonage
I wish Verizon was in my area….
December 5th, 2006 at 11:00 am
The original artical assumes there is some kind of rivalry between AT&T and Verizon… but, in fact, the “new” AT&T is but a new coat of paint over SBC. The original AT&T has been dismembered and consumed, and really no longer exists –despite the former SBC’s claims to its former fame.
More to the point, these two companies are building out their infrastructure in mostly different parts of the country, so its not really an issue of who will eat whose lunch because they don’t typically compete with each other in the same markets.
As for copper vs. fiber… sure, copper works, but fiber is vastly more wideband –not to mention free from spurious electromagnetic interference and emissions, so, eventually, fiber is the inevitable superhighway of choice when there simply is no choice but to widen the highway. In the short term, it’s cost-effective for AT&T/SBC to utilize copper for as long as they can to avoid the huge expense of building out new fiber plant like Verizon is. Verizon, on the other hand, is gambling that the investment will pay off soon enough through increased access to other markets, such as CATV and VOIP, that they previously had limited access to — a pretty shrewd move, IMHO.
December 12th, 2006 at 8:19 am
I can only hope that AT&T is actually choosing to stay with copper over fiber because there is some alternate method comming soon. But assuming there isn’t, way to go AT&T for NOT embrasing the future, way to stay stagnant and not improve an already aging infrastructure. CEO reasonings liek this are part o he reason the USA is slipping farther and farther behind countries like Korea. (that and we have more than 200 times the infrasructure to upgrade.)