AT&T’s GigaPower -which competes with Google Fiber- is currently available in Austin, TX.  This Tuesday, AT&T received approval from the city of Winston-Salem, N.C., to begin building out its FTTH based GigaPower service.  That comes two months after AT&T announced it was in talks with the North Carolina Next Generation Network to bring high-speed fiber to the state. Winston-Salem is one of six cities in North Carolina expected to receive AT&T’s GigaPower service.  Another is Durham, NC, which was announced today:   http://about.att.com/story/att_uverse_with_gigapower_fiber_network_coming_to_durham.html

The company expects GigaPower construction and deployment to begin in other communities this year.  Metro areas being explored for GigaPower include:  Atlanta, Augusta, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Fort Lauderdale, Ft. Worth, Greensboro, Houston, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Oakland, Orlando, Raleigh-Durham, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose/Santa Clara, St. Louis.

This blog from Eric Small, AT&T Vice President of Fiber Broadband Planning, explains some of the more technical aspects as to how the company is rolling out GigaFiber: http://blogs.att.net/consumerblog/story/a7791741

Technical Outline of GigaPower Process:

·         U-verse with GigaPower enables residents who sign up to enjoy speeds of up to 300 megabytes per second

o   Within the next year, AT&T plans to boost speeds to up to 1 gigabyte per second

·         Traditionally, fiber network connection that starts at AT&T’s central switching office. Fiber cable from the office runs to a VRAD equipment box in the neighborhood, which then uses existing copper wires to transmit U-verse signals to homes

o   GigaPower bypasses the VRAD by using a passive optical splitter which runs fiber directly into homes

·         Armored fiber ‘drop’ cable connects the customer home to the network

o   Drop cable connects to the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) outside of the home. A CAT5e or CAT6 cable connects the ONT to the U-verse residential gateway inside the home.

o   Cable splicing is done in the factory instead of the field, saving time and money and enables higher quality connection

Reference:

More information on GigaPower can be found at:  http://about.att.com/mediakit/gigapower

Addendum:

As part of it’s proposed acquistion of DirecTV, AT&T told the FCC and Justice Dept:

“AT&T commits to deploying high-speed broadband to 15 million new customers as part of the transaction, but only two million will receive high-speed fiber connections.”

AT&T said its U-Verse product, which supplies high-speed broadband and pay-TV services to almost six million customers, could at best cover only a quarter of the nation’s TV households.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB2000142405270230364270457961871127…