atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information ATT & Fiber

So within past few weeks ATT is actively pulling and splicing fiber in my area of resedency, I wonder what they're up to.....

It'll be a year, at least, before anything happens.

Sam

They are competing with the cable companies. And Direct TV. Down south there going full steam ahead.

Is this going to be FTP or FTN? If at&t is going FTP, then, they are a few steps behind Verizon. Verizon is slowly capping FiOS expansion with the intent of delivering content OTA...ala Verizon Wireless.

AT&T owns DirecTV now. https://about.att.com/story/att_completes_acquisition_of_directv.html
So their only competition is cable companies, muni-networks (which they lobby heavily to block), and cell companies. Yay competition. /sarcasm

Signed up for AT&T fiber today, $50/month for a year. Just couldn’t resist their offer of 300mb symmetrical speed.
I was looking for reviews on quality, but didn’t find much.
Has anyone tried their service?

Is this a commercial or residential service? Massachusetts is Verizon territory so at&t acts as a CLEC in these parts.

I live in florida and had att fiber installed in my home about 7 months ago. I have a 1gig fiber connection into my house. We have been extremely pleased with the service. Since its been in we have had only 1 outage and i believe it was more splicing happening around our area. Oh yea and att automatically credited our bill 50.00 for the outage. Try that with comcast lol.

Y'all are making me jealous.... Manchester has zero fiber to the premise from any provider. Consolidated (CC) is using VDSL where the infrastructure can support it. ADSL everywhere else. CC's prices are decent, but speeds are slow once you get more than about 10 blocks from the local CO. On the outskirts where I am, the best CC can offer is 3Mbps using the old ATM dsl tech. The only other provider in town is Comcast. Their service is -ok- but their prices are insane. Neither can offer synchronous up and down speeds. Even if you opt for Gig from Comcast, the upload speed is capped at 40 megs.

We have Comcast at my house, service tier is 250/10, it averages 300/12, so hooray for the overachievers at Comcast. It's right around $100 a month give or take a few bucks. If CC had fiber out my way and could offer me 100/100 for the same price I'd dump Comcast in a New York minute.

The last Consolidated tech I talked to said they were working on upgrades throughout the city as time goes on, essentially doing a FTN thing, and then replacing the copper from there to the terminals so they could roll out VDSL around most of the city. Manchester has been plagued with really bad copper for years now. When we switched from Comcast to CC at the bar I do work for, the tech had to go through about 15 pairs to find three good ones for our 2 DSL dry loops and the one voice line. He was the same tech that told me about their gradual FTN roll-out. Nice guy, knew his business. He said the number of bad pairs in the ducts coming out of the CO was just incredible. He was telling me that it's going to be slow going because the condition of the infrastructure in Manchester is just so bad. He didn't give me numbers, but he said it's going to be a long, expensive process to get the cabling in this city up to where it needs to be. I guess from Verizon leaving it in such bad shape and then handing it over to Fairpoint, who never had the money to fix it, it just has gotten worse with each passing year.

Here's another kicker. About a mile up the road from me is a large subdivision/apartment complex thing. When that was built, whoever was the LEC at the time, (NYNEX or Bell Atlantic maybe) put in one of those little buildings near the end of the road going into the complex. I don't know what you call it, its maybe the same footprint as a two car garage. Anyway, its fiber fed from the CO downtown. So.... All those apartments and townhouses have access to 80+ Mbit VDSL, since all they had to do was stuff the equipment in that little building and hitch it up to -presumably- spare fibers in the cables going back to the Concord Street CO. But since I live on the old existing street, our cables don't go near that shed, and instead go all the way 6+ miles back to Concord Street. So we have to wait.

Can a guy get a little fiber love?

1 Gig is available to the majority of our little town and we are scheduled to have fiber service available by 2025. Across the street fiber is available and the golf course out our backdoor has it also.

My first connection to the internet at home was using a 14.4 external modem on my work 486 laptop on regular copper pair.

Residential, single family home, not so densely populated area (highland park, IL), so I was surprised
1 gig is available also, but pointless due to my firewall 150 mbit max throughput.

Sounds like this particular service is at&t's version of Verizon FiOS.

I had FiOS installed at the house soon after Verizon began selling it in our town. Been a happy customer for years. Very few problems. When a problem does occur, Verizon has been good about getting it resolved in, what I would consider, a reasonable amount of time.

The weak spot is the battery backup system for the ONT. The battery needs to be replaced every-so-often. I've had to have the battery charging unit replaced multiple times over the years as they do eventually malfunction.

No compatibility issues with my Avaya Partner ACS or any of our computer equipment.

I read an article a while back - sorry I can't cite a reference offhand - that some phone company was repairing and re-certifying their copper infrastructure and just putting 48V battery on the pairs to power their fiber ONT's. Always on, no need to replace backup batteries, and no fixing blown out power supplies.

Makes sense. Every LEC just lashes their brand new fiber over the existing copper anyway, and it's already going to the same places. May as well use it for something.

I can only wish that Verizon had included a power feed with fiber when installing FiOS.

But with Verizon looking to get away from land-based delivery in favor of an OTA approach, I have my doubts that it would make any effort to do something like that now.

The back up power for new Fios installs in NYC consists of an optional battery box that holds 12 D cells. There is a manually operated switch on the box that is turned on in the event of a power failure.

It never ceases to amaze me what Verizon installs for FiOS. It's like a different salesman comes by every few months and says "I can give you a really great deal on this if you buy 100,000 pieces." I've probably seen at least half a dozen different ONTs in the last three years. They went from this huge outdoor unit to one that is about the size of a 4 port switch that sits with the other IT crap.

If you want battery backup just supply a UPS. What's the problem?

-Hal

I have the first ONT that Verizon used for FiOS installations. It is large and made by Tellabs. The battery backup uses a 12v sealed battery as opposed to the multi D cell.

RCN salespeople stop by the house once in a while looking for us to switch. They claim that RCN now has their own fiber in our area. A quick look at the utility poles along the street doesn't quite support that statement.

They just don't want anything to do with being a phone company, do they?

It looks like they want to a content provider as opposed to a communications company (outside of mobile services). We shall see how this all shakes out. Last week a Verizon trunk spent two days in the hole in front of the Church. Something was either being pulled through conduit, or preparations were being made for a pull. I didn't want to pester the workers, so I minded my Ps & Qs.

Everybody wants to be a "Content Provider" but it seems like no one has any interest in providing or maintaining the infrastructure to get that content from one place to another. Everybody is all excited about this new craze called 5G.... Go ahead, drink that kool-aid right up. Even my father is ranting about it... First off, it'll be years before that tech makes it to podunk New Hampshire, then what? Yippie, its fast internet, that's what EVERYBODY wants, right? Except it's still going to be considered cellular data and all the stupid data caps and pricing will still exist. Great, I'll have 10 gig speeds (or some over-hyped claim). It just means I can hit my 4 gig cap on my phone that much faster. But, my father says, it's an alternative to Comcast for the internet in the house.... Riiiiight.... With what sort of per gigabyte charge and what sort of data cap? They're going to want to pay for this new tech roll out somehow... We use better than 400 gigabytes (yes, bytes, not bits) of data over our internet connection every month in my house. There's no way that will be cheaper over some new-fangled network run by the greedy cell carriers. Not to mention, the range on this 5G is next to nothing so there's going to have to be nodes/tranceivers/repeaters on every third utility pole? You can't tell me there won't be fiber or something connecting them all back to some head end. Why not just take the same damned fiber and RUN IT TO MY HOUSE. I mean, seriously, how fast does data need to be on a handheld device. I find 4G LTE to be plenty fast enough for anything I do with a cell phone.

Since I'm on my little rant, I'll relate some observations I made when driving into Somerville, MA the other day. I was killing time waiting for a friend to come out of his apartment, so I was idly looking at the utility poles and the general decrepitude of inner city utility wiring and a thought occurred. You would never see this level of ineptitude in New Hampshire. I wish I had a picture of the rats nest of wires that were hanging in front of my friend's building. That's Verizon territory. They just do not care, and the company doesn't want their employees to care. You drive into New Hampshire and look at the condition of the outside plant compared to Massachusetts and it's night and day. Yeah, it's not perfect, but it doesn't scream IDGAF like I saw down there. CC has gotten pretty much all caught up on attachment moves, the splice cases have been fixed and sealed meaning no more trash bags taped over them, and the general workmanship is just better. Yeah, I gripe that there's no fiber where I am, but I'm still grateful to have a company in town that seems to give a hoot about their subscribers and their equipment.

Verizon should take notes.

Somerville's utility poles are pretty well filled with power, Verizon copper, Comcast coax and RCN coax. This is particularly true in areas to the east of Winter Hill as there are a lot of multi-family domiciles that are spaced so close that you could almost reach out your window and shake your neighbor's hand.

With Comcast and RCN offering high speed data, TV and phone services I don't see Verizon making any effort to remove dead cables. I also suspect that the two cable providers also have excess stuff abandoned overhead.

Interesting thing about Verizon in Somerville...the company was at one time looking to offer cable TV over the existing copper OSP. I was told by former co-workers who used to work for New England Telephone that the equipment was installed in the Verizon central office, but, the service never came to fruition, so, the equipment was taken right back out.

Most of the mess I was referring to was Verizon copper, but there was no shortage of CATV stuff up there, too. I had never seen so many daisy-chained tap blocks in my life.

Problem with express power (using existing copper infrastructure to power FTTH), is that a large part of it is in no shape to continuously power those ONT's. And there are very few around anymore who care (or know how) to maintain and properly repair this infrastructure.

Where I am now in NC, there really aren't a lot of options for the end users. It's either CenturyLink for phone or Spectrum for cable. Level 3 had a huge point of presence here and was the predominant CLEC, but since CenturyLink bought them, they are strong-arming customers to go back to their original copper plant instead of T1 circuits and channel banks/IADs.

Spectrum is expensive, but they do manage to come through on their promise of 200 meg via coax, and it is consistent on basic residential accounts, 400 on business. Mine is often higher. I bought their voice/data/TV bundle, with the basic TV channel lineup and it's about $180.00 per month. Because I need a real phone line for modem use, I pay another $30.00 for a copper POTS line from CenturyLink.

There's been some chat in this thread regarding the deplorable state of Verizon's copper plant. Having lived and worked in their DC/MD and VA region for decades, I can confirm that they really don't have any desire to do anything about it. Their golden child FiOS didn't work out too well where I was, so as Dex said, they're holding out for their 5G product as their last-ditch effort to exist. They really don't want to be in this business as is demonstrated by their products. What's ironic is that in some of their areas where FiOS was never deployed, they brought in the best of the best of their copper crews and put up some beautiful OSP work. Areas between Richmond, VA and Williamsburg, VA are examples. It's beautiful, like a work of art. It's like plumbing in the air with regard to neat bends, etc.

Back to the original subject: CenturyLink's copper plant in this area is in amazingly good condition. Years ago, Sprint took eastern North Carolina over from the former United/Carolina Telephone independent. They spent TONS of money on OSP rehab or replacement. They also replaced all COs in about a 30 mile radius with 5ESS offices. I mean they went as far as to go into existing buildings and replace the BETs with the latest and greatest, whether they were needed or not. The techs I've spoken to here in my travels tell me of how they rarely have issues with cable pairs, and even when they do, it is due to the usual: bullet holes, squirrels, lightning, cars hitting pedestals, etc. Their plant is really good for an independent.

Now they do offer their version of Verizon's FiOS or AT&T's U-Verse called 'Prism', but they really, really cherry-pick the areas where it's offered. It's a true FTTH product and they offer a full compliment of TV services. During my recent hospital stay, they were using Prism and the service was just fine. Someone, and I'm not sure who, is putting up 5G sites on poles all over the place around here. My guess is that it's CenturyLink, since their FTTH footprint is not growing.

Many of my neighbors in my apartment community are using CenturyLink's bonded DSL service. They manage to get about 60 Meg for $50.00, which is sufficient for streaming, from what I've been told. That's the only other Internet service they offer, unless someone really wants to go cheap and get their 25 Meg standard DSL. They don't offer DSL-only accounts, so I use my neighbor's 'free' POTS line as my occasional third one when needed. Yes, he knows that I'm doing this.

At&T's former BellSouth territories are about 30 miles north, south or east of here. Their deployment of U-Verse via FTTH is somewhat limited, but they're sure doing a lot of it using bonded DSL. It seems crazy, but I've seen it in action; decent data speeds and TV service over two copper pairs. In those areas, they seem to be taking care of their copper OSP as well.

One town about 20 miles west from here is served by Windstream (formerly AllTel). We have a customer there that needed more speed than a T1 could offer and all they had out in the country was the 100 pair copper cable feeding the building. Windstream bonded eight T1 circuits together using copper and believe it or not, it works pretty well. I think that there's still plenty of technology out there to support the copper infrastructure for a while.

The moral of the story is that the telcos are only going to spend money on what makes them money. That's just good business sense. I say fine, but if you're done with your old plant, you need to clean it up or remove it from sight.

I was at an install the other day and had a decent conversation with the Comcast tech. Some friends of mine are opening a retail store and opted for phone/tv/internet service from Comcast. I may rag on Comcast frequently, but that mostly has to do with their business practices. Just about all their installers are pretty decent guys who care about their work. There's the occasional bad apple, sure. Anyways... I had a pretty lengthy talk with the tech and he was telling me about how Comcast is slowly changing their infrastructure over. He said that all new developments will be fiber fed, at least in this area. Any new buildouts will be strictly fiber. Right now, most of their infrastructure is FTTN, with coax for the last mile. He rattled off a handful of new developments, neighborhoods and apartment complexes in my area that are all FTTH. He told me which ONT they're using, but it escapes me at the moment. I thought that was a pretty neat thing. I also think Comcast is finally seeing the writing on the wall that people want high speed internet more than they really want cable TV.

Come on, Consolidated.... Where's your fiber?

we do a lot of card access, CCTV, etc for a 4 building apartment complex. The newest building is 2-3 years old. Not one pair of copper entering the building from at&t, just fiber that gets converted mostly to uVerse.

The Comcast installers around here are a bunch of clowns. We're installing Comcast SD-WAN as backup to our Frontier fiber network in a bunch of offices.

It looks like the work was performed by blind fifth-graders - with my apologizes to blind fifth-graders.

Post some pics.

Consolidated Communications will do fiber, if you want to pay for a business connection and sign a contract. I'm told they are getting aggressive with pricing too vs the competition like Spectrum or Firstlight. That's really all CCI wants to do. Around these parts CCI has for the most part given up on their copper plant. Here or there a small project but most pole or attachment transfers aren't done, even when a car cracks a pole, they'll just bolt crossarms onto the new pole to hold it up, not bother to do the attachment transfer, and call it good for years. Aerial drops hanging down from poles, wrapped up around the base or in the grass. Even old guy-wires electrical taped to poles. Most of the I&R workers have checked out, just there for a paycheck, do the minimal amount of work so mgmt doesn't harass them, and that's it. No initiative, no thinking outside the box. And the ones that haven't are few and far between, are overloaded with work, dealing with unmaintained copper plant making do with what they can. This has been going on for at least 20 years, only in the last 10 really bad. Sad situation really.

I haven't really seen that here. They seem to be just about caught up on attachments, I don't see bag covered splice cases, and they re-cabled a large area in the north end of the city to support faster copper-based internet, whether that's ADSL or VDSL. Every tech I've crossed paths with seemed to be in decent spirits, happy they were under new management, and plenty busy with work. Maybe I got lucky, and ran into the few good ones. The only thing I've seen that correlates with what you've seen is the damn drop wires all over the place wrapped around poles. No one ever bothers to call to have the drop removed from their house, people just cut them off and if they're nice, they wrap it around the pole. The worst offenders are the vinyl siding crews. The homeowner says "I don't want all these wires, I don't have a land line" and instead of saying they aren't allowed to touch the cables, they happily oblige so they don't have to work around them. Every time I have the chance, I tell people they legally can't remove them and to just call, but 80% don't listen or don't care.

Maybe being in a city with a halfway decent customer base makes them care a little more. I don't know. I know before the buy out, it was very much the way you describe. Double poles for years, poor attitudes, crappy service. I still think it's too early to tell.

I know they'll do fiber if you go the business route. They also want business grade prices for it. I asked already. I'm just annoyed that I pay comcast 25-40% more than what a CC customer pays for the same service where fiber is available. Minor nag, but I'm also not a fan of the 5 or 6 drops coming to my house hanging at all different levels right outside the living room window. It would be pretty nice to see the electric drop and a fiber and nothing else. I've got 2 or 3 unused telephone drops, cable, electric, and the working phone drop. It's kind of an eyesore. I tightened them up to get the grouping a bit tighter, but still. Yuck.

The thing that gets me is how RBOCS...especially Verizon...want to get away from copper...yet...when given the ok to offer fiber in a particular town or city...will request numerous exemption/hardships to avoid paying a little extra to install the upgraded services.

I've been a FiOS customer since it was first offered in town. Yet, there is no FiOS service available to my church 5 blocks away. Why? because power, phone & cable TV lines are underground and Verizon doesn't want to pay to trench the property line in order to lay fiber to our building as well as the other two buildings on the block. To be sure, Verizon does have empty conduits under the street in front of the building (technicians have pointed them out to me when I've stopped to chat with them).

To be fair, the copper service has been very good over the years. The reason is, most likely, due to the fact that the cables used to get from the C.O. to the church are all underground, so, they are well protected from the elements. The problem is Verizon will only commit to a max Internet speed of 7 down 768 up. Also to be fair, neither of the cable providers (Comcast and RCN) will service the church building and neither have conduits under the street in front of the building. One of the cable providers offered to install a drop from a utility pole on a side street to the back of the building, secure the cable to the back outside wall, drill a hole into the structure and run the cable throughout the inside rooms to get it to the phone closet. My response was "Call us when the company is willing to correctly run the cable to get to the closet.".

My guess is that Verizon won't offer the church any upgraded services unless it elects (and the town agrees) to install 5G OTA transmitters.