“Gigabit” has a long way to go in terms of replacing the ubiquitous “cloud services” as the most used tech term, but there’s no doubt that, thanks to Google, Gigabit is now firmly entrenched in at least some consumers’ minds.
For those scoring at home, AT&T, Grande Communications, Google Fiber, Suddenlink Communications, TDS Telecom, CenturyLink, Bright House Networks, Atlantic Broadband, Comporium, and Cox Communications have, or plan to have 1-Gigabit services available in parts of their respective service areas.
On Thursday, Cox’s press release provided pictures of the first family in Arizona to sign up for its G1GABLAST offering, which will go live in the Grand Canyon state later this month before rolling into Omaha and Las Vegas.
It was just a few years ago that cable operators countered Google Fiber’s ambitions by saying that consumers didn’t want 1-Gig speeds, but now we have the cable industry’s DOCSIS 3.1-based “Gigasphere” services ready for testing next year and AT&T’s “GigaPower” slated for areas of Chicago and Atlanta next year after previous launches in Austin and Dallas/Fort Worth.
AT&T’s Chicago/Atlanta announcement on Monday was, as usual, short on pricing information and deployment areas in Chicago and Atlanta. AT&T has done a good job of following Google’s lead by announcing fiber-based 1-Gig plans in key cities and then letting the more affluent residents in those areas clamor for the services before building out the networks.
In April, AT&T announced a major initiative to expand its GigaPower fiber network to up to 100 candidate cities and municipalities throughout 25 markets nationwide. AT&T has also 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.
Other recent GigaPower rollout announcements include Charlotte, Greensboro, Houston, Nashville, Overland Park, Kan., Raleigh-Durham, San Antonio, and Winston-Salem. These announcements feed AT&T’s GigaPower hype machine, aided by those of us that continually write each announcement up.
For its part, Google will start signing up customers for its 1-Gig service in December and will initially target neighborhoods in the south and southwest sections of the city, according to Gigaom.
While AT&T, CenturyLink and Google Fiber target specific areas of cities for their 1-Gig tiers, the cable industry is moving forward with its DOCSIS 3.1 deployment plans, which will be capable of delivering 1 to 10 Gbps speeds to the vast majority of large cable operators’ footprints.
And the cable operators are also quick to point out that 1-Gig speeds can be obtained on existing networks. Three years ago Comcast demonstrated 1-Gig on its network and last year it hit 3 Gbps speeds during a 3.1 demonstration. In July, Time Warner Cable announced it was participating in the city of Los Angeles’ request for information (RFI) process that is targeting the development of a communitywide 1 Gigabit network that could serve area residents, businesses and city government.
So while we’re in the initial stages of the Gigabit Wars, the deciding factor will, of course, be the subscribers that vote for a Gigabit service with their wallets. In the end, cable operators are betting that real, scaled services, with announced price points and bundles, as well as game-changing platforms such as Comcast’s X1 and Liberty’s Horizon, will trump pockets of Gigabit deployments in their footprints. For the near future, scale matters before we get to all fiber, but all fiber is a discussion for another day.
