In their press release yesterday, April 21, 2014, AT&T Eyes 100 U.S. Cities and Municipalities for its Ultra-Fast Fiber Network, residents of close to 100 additional cities within 21 major metro areas may be getting up to 1gbps speeds to the Internet. This list of cities includes some of the same metro areas targeted by Google Fiber.
The list of 21 candidate metropolitan areas includes: Atlanta, Augusta, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Fort Worth, Fort Lauderdale, Greensboro, Houston, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Oakland, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego, St. Louis, San Francisco, and San Jose. With previously announced markets, AT&T now has committed to or is exploring 25 metro areas for fiber deployment.
Our neighbor to the north, Cleveland, made the list with AT&T, but no cities in Ohio are on the list with Google Fiber. Cleveland is also home to One Community building fiber to the home. AT&T also intends to offer gigabit service at between $70 and $80 per month, depending on whether the home user is willing to let AT&T harvest its usage data. This pricing is going to create an expectation for a drop in pricing for lower speed broadband services. The Dayton region can wait for AT&T or Google Fiber to bring gigabit speeds to our homes, or we can build the fiber to the home network ourselves. Extra Mile Fiber is planning to build the high speed fiber network with service speeds and pricing just like AT&T and Google Fiber. Are you interested?
Leigh Sandy is the founder of Extra Mile Fiber and has been building and operating networks connected to the Internet since 1995.