I suspect, now that they've started, AT&T is going to continue to build out their GPON fiber through most of their network. In a lot of areas, they do have real issues with the copper wire that's on the poles, and they've figured out how to make rewiring not too bad, at least where the residential wiring is above ground.
They've got a significant advantage over Google here. Where they run DSL, they've got a customer base, and an installer base. They already have rights to the poles. They've already got contacts in the municipalities to add their new equipment boxes. They worked out how to order the fiber spools with connectors placed for the splitters at each pole. It's just a matter of buying and placing the equipment, upgrading their existing customers, and then winning customers from cable.
For customers with underground copper wiring, it's a tougher sell. And there are clearly parts of the AT&T network that AT&T doesn't care to service; places that never got ADSL2 or VDSL (aka U-Verse) likely have pretty low customer numbers these days, and it seems like they'd probably not get upgraded either.
My parents lives in a smallish city - 77K population and shrinking. They’ve had AT&T DSL for years. AT&T hasn’t sold DSL for years there but for some reason keep it active for their few existing customers.
Yeah... those are exactly the kinds of places I don't expect AT&T to roll out fiber to. As long as the equipment keeps working, they'll probably continue to offer the service to existing customers. But they're not likely to fix line quality issues if they don't affect voice service; and they're not likely to stop voice service if you have a strong state regulator.
They also have the cable internet. My parents wanted to keep both. She got cable internet one summer when I stayed with them and I needed to work remotely. Cable sucks about as badly. The speed and the price is about what you would expect (35/5) but the 300Gb data cap is ridiculous.
I’m surprised that AT&T doesn’t just try to transistion their few remaining DSL customers to the cable company. I’m sure that the cable company would offer a bounty for them and keeping the internet backend must cost AT&T something.
They've got a significant advantage over Google here. Where they run DSL, they've got a customer base, and an installer base. They already have rights to the poles. They've already got contacts in the municipalities to add their new equipment boxes. They worked out how to order the fiber spools with connectors placed for the splitters at each pole. It's just a matter of buying and placing the equipment, upgrading their existing customers, and then winning customers from cable.
For customers with underground copper wiring, it's a tougher sell. And there are clearly parts of the AT&T network that AT&T doesn't care to service; places that never got ADSL2 or VDSL (aka U-Verse) likely have pretty low customer numbers these days, and it seems like they'd probably not get upgraded either.