AT&T Plans GigaPower Debut In Dallas/Ft. Worth this Summer; 100 Candidate Cities on Drawing Board
AT&T will upgrade its U-verse fiber to the premises service with speeds up to 1 Gbps through its GigaPower program in parts of Dallas and Fort Worth, TX this summer. The company said it would begin at speeds up to 100 Mbps, with upgrades to 1 Gbps by the end of the year. U-verse is AT&T’s high-speed broadband double and triple play service to residential subscribers. However, both U-verse TV and U-verse Internet are available as single service offerings.
In Austin,TX – the first market to get access to AT&T’s GigaPower platform -the giant telco is initially offering 300 Mbps, and plans to accelerate to 1-Gig sometime later this year. Google Fiber has begun to build out its 1-Gig infrastructure in Austin so that must be providing AT&T with motivation and incentive to build out GigaPower in Austin.
AT&T has not announced pricing for GigaPower services in Dallas/Ft. Worth. In Austin, the broadband service runs $70 per month; $100 per month when paired with the U-verse Voice Unlimited service; $120 per month with the U200 TV package with HBO; and $150 per month with U200 TV with HBO and U-verse Voice Unlimited. All offers come with one-year commitments that could result in an early termination fee of up to $348, The Austin version of U-verse with GigaPower is also capped at 1 terabyte per month. AT&T charges $10 for each additional bucket of 50 Gigabytes above that threshold, with a maximum monthly overage charge of $30.
Note: From my own personal U-Verse customer experience (2+ years), prices rise sharply afer the one year promo ends.
AT&T is considering a plan to expand GigaPower to as many as 100 candidate cities, and has proposed to expand GigaPower to an additional 2 million customers as a condition of its pending acquisition of DirecTV.
AT&T’s U-verse service attracted 488,000 new customers in the quarter, bringing the total to 11.5 million subscribers. Total U-verse revenues, including business,were up 27.9% year over year. U-verse is now a $13 billion annualized revenue stream for AT&T.
Overall U-verse revenues increased by almost 28% y-o-y on the back of solid growth in U-verse TV and Broadband Internet revenues. U-verse TV added 190,000 subscribers in Q2 to take its total user base to 5.9 million and U-verse high speed Internet added 488,000 new subscribers in the quarter to take its total to 11.5 million.
This rise in subscriptions helped the company improve its proportion of U-verse subscribers to total broadband users to 70% in Q2 2014 from 55% in the year-ago quarter. And why not? The cost-performance of U-verse Internet is much better than the older ATM over ADSL Internet.
References:
http://www.multichannel.com/news/technology/att-preps-summer-gigapower-d…
http://www.att.com/att/gigapowercities/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2014/07/24/atts-q2-earning…