While both Time Warner Cable and A&TT have bigger fish to fry. including the cable operator’s merger with Comcast next year, and AT&T’s acquisition of DirecTV, the two companies continue to square off in Austin.
AT&T also said it would be launching a new gateway in Austin that would be “twice as fast as what is generally available today,” although it didn’t mention Time Warner Cable by name. A spokeswoman for AT&T said the company was working to make the gateways available soon, but declined to say which vendor was making them. Existing AT&T GigaPower customers can score a new Wi-Fi gateway at no charge once they become available.
AT&T announced this morning that it had completed the free speed upgrade to 1 Gigabit for all of its GigaPower subscribers in Austin. AT&T launched GigaPower in Austin late last year as a symmetrical 300 Mbps tier before it started to upgrade its customers to 1 Gigabit this past summer. AT&T doesn’t break out the number of GigaPower subscribers it has in Austin, but the spokeswoman said AT&T had “added tens of thousands of homes in this 2014 expansion, on top of the tens of thousands we had already reached after the initial deployment in 2013.”
AT&T announced in January that its GPON-based GigaPower service in Austin would be expanded to reach twice the number of households as originally planned by the end of this year.
The expansion was completed in September, three months ahead of schedule, and now stretches into additional homes and small businesses in Austin and surrounding communities, including parts of Bastrop, Cedar Park, Dripping Springs, Jollyville, Lakeway, Leander, Pflugerville, and Round Rock.
“The response to our U-verse with AT&T GigaPower network validates exactly why we chose Austin as our first fiber broadband market, and why this expansion happened so quickly,” said Dave Nichols, president, AT&T Texas. “Austinites have a genuine appreciation for fast and efficient technology. They haven’t let us down and we’re thrilled to serve up even more fiber fast speeds, including over our in-home Wi-Fi network.”
To further entice Austin users, area residents who add a new AT&T wireless plan to a new or existing U-verse with the GigaPower service plan will be eligiblefor a one-time $100 promotional credit on their AT&T wireless monthly bill. The offer runs through Nov. 8. Customers need to have a qualifying AT&T wireless plan and a U-verse with AT&T GigaPower high speed Internet plan for 45 days garner the bill credit.
GigaPower has also launched in Dallas and Forth Worth, with 12 new cities, including Charlotte, Cupertino, Greensboro, Houston, Jacksonville, Miami, Nashville, Overland Park, Kan., Raleigh-Durham, St. Louis, San Antonio, and Winston-Salem, slated for the service.
AT&T has said that upon its proposed acquisition of DirecTV that it would expand the AT&T GigaPower network to an additional two million customer locations. Those two million locations are above and beyond what the company announced in April.
Last week Time Warner Cable announced it had completed the data portion of its TWC Maxx project network upgrade in Austin, which meant all of its subscribers in the area now have access to faster broadband speeds, including a 300 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up offering.
Time Warner Cable competes with Google Fiber, AT&T and Grande Communications in parts of Austin, with all three competitors either offering or planning to offer a 1-Gig service over fiber.
As part of its “TWC Maxx” service upgrade, which includes going all digital, Time Warner Cable previously launched 300 Mbps tiers in parts of Los Angeles and New York City while other tiers saw speed increases as well. Time Warner Cable has also aggressively added Wi-Fi hotspots in and around Austin.
