Today AT&T officially launched its U-Verse GigaPower service in Austin, which came out of the starter’s blocks with symmetrical 300 Mbps speeds before ramping up to 1 Gbps next year.
Customers who sign up for the 300 Mbps service will be upgraded to the 1 Gig speeds when they become available at no extra cost. AT&T announced in October that GigaPower would be launching this month in Austin.
“Our all-fiber network enables U-verse with GigaPower to give Austinites the fastest speeds available to consumers in the city,” said Dahna Hull, AT&T’s vice president and general manager for Austin. “With U-verse with GigaPower, our customers can download movies and music and navigate, post and interact on the web faster than ever before, and have one of the best TV experiences around. It’s reliable, crazy fast and priced to attract more and more people to give us a try.”
AT&T said its GigaPower service would initially be “available in tens of thousands customer locations throughout Austin.” Like Google’s strategy with its fiber rollouts, AT&T is allowing consumers and business owner to vote on where the service should initially be deployed in Austin. Currently the service, which features two tiers, is available in Austin area neighborhoods such as French Place, Mueller, Zilker and Onion Creek.
The GigaPower Premiere tier features the 300 Mbps service for $70 a month and waives fees for equipment, service activation and installation. Customers who also select U-verse TV will receive free HBO and HBO Go for 36 months, and HD service for $120 per month with qualifying TV services.
The Standard tier has the same speeds but costs $99 a month. GigaPower customers that also select U-verse TV will get U-verse’s largest storage capacity DVR while GigaPower subscribers that are also AT&T wireless customers will get 50 GB of free cloud storage.
Google Fiber plans on offering its 1 Gbps service next year in Austin while Time Warner Cable has been adding in Wi-Fi hot spots in Austin to keep customers. Time Warner Cable’s fasted residential service in Austin is 50 Mbps, and it offers up to 10 Gigabits for businesses via its dedicated fiber services.
