AT&T intros sat internet access, ramps up FTTH and WiMAX

Though the product seemed to be in a bit of disarray, ever since AT&T announced Homezone it's been increasingly clear to us that they're very seriously taking into account their market position in a world that doesn't any longer revolve around the landline. Enter their latest broadband offerings announcements; while effectively separate from Homezone, they mirror its hodge podge effect in the area of low-cost internet access. AT&T intends to begin servicing those narrower banded of individuals with WildBlue provided satellite internet access starting this month with rates between $50 and $80 for up to 1.5Mbps / 256Kbps service; they announced rolling out fiber to the home (FTTH -- aka AT&T's Project Lightspeed) to another 5.5 million low income houses in 41 markets, perhaps because as we all know it has the most amazing cost-per-megabit metric of any consumer service; and finally complementing their currently existing fixed-wireless rollouts in Jersey, Georgia, and Alaska with more WiMAX to light up soon in Nevada and Texas starting at $40 a month. By this time next year AT&T apparently hopes to be serving you cellular, 3G, home phone, ADSL, sat television and net, FTTH, IPTV, and WiMAX. We forget anything, AT&T, or are we clear for now? You want people to have options, we get it, we get it.

[Via GigaOM]

[lolersticks @ May 9th 2006 9:05AM]

Wait: I am NOT in low-income housing, and even I cannot get FTTH. Dammit.

[standingup @ May 9th 2006 10:15AM]

AT&T is also spending tremendous amounts of money lobbying Congress to be able to censor and discriminate against competition on the internet. Take time to visit Save the Internet to learn about the fight for Net Neutrality. Let AT&T and the other internet providers know the internet must remain free and open for everyone. If they prevail, AT&T will be able to block customer's access to sites that don't pay them a fee or grant access at a lower speed creating a preferred network for content providers who can afford to pay AT&T to be in the fast lane.

[Dave @ May 9th 2006 10:19AM]

Yeah, brand new luxury spot and fiber has not yet arrived. Oh well.

I thought, however, that the ping time on satellite connections was really bad? I can't recall. So there might be more than just cost involved in FTTH's benefits list.

20 years from now everyone who wants it will probably have fiber and won't think twice. In fact you'd think with all the profits they are making that the cableco's would start wiring FTTH as well. But I guess they are always last to any party anyway. Oh well, we'll see.

[PEZ @ May 9th 2006 10:28AM]

Sat internet access is unreliable and it sucks. IF you live in the dessert, or ammish country, and its your oly option - OK. But I dont think they are reading this.

[DG Lewis @ May 9th 2006 10:56AM]

Lightspeed is overwhelmingly Fiber to the Curb (FTTC), not Fiber to the Home (FTTH). Less than 10% of Lightspeed deployment will be FTTH, typically in new developments; the vast majority is FTTC with ADSL2/VDSL tails to the home.

[Chaz @ May 9th 2006 11:27AM]

I part-time with an ISP that supports 14 other ISP's throughout the rural parts of Texas. Currently there are 3 out of the 14 that support the WildBlue system and a few others do the FTTH setup as well. These ISP's are either the proving ground for that technology or this is new news talking about already existing products. But as the line states below Texas won't get the technology rollouts until next month. What's up Engadget?
--Chaz

"and finally complementing their currently existing fixed-wireless rollouts in Jersey, Georgia, and Alaska with more WiMAX to light up soon in Nevada and Texas starting at $40 a month."

[Jason @ May 9th 2006 12:21PM]

Lightspeed is generaly VDSL2 which should bring 20Mbps (asymmetric) to homes within 4000 feet. Although 20Mbps is nice, running one TV in HD will pretty much take all of it (unless it is compressed to oblivion). Although it is nice that AT&T is getting in to the high bandwidth game, this solution is more stop-gap. People already are demading more than what this system can provide long term. Telecom systems have a 5 to 10 year lifespan. There is no way that 20Mb will last that long. So they are just going to have to rip it up and start over again.

The problem is the copper in the ground. It has a physical upper limit to what can be done with it (as in mankind cannot fly by flapping his arms). Sure the VDSL and the Docsis (for coax) have exteneded what can be done, but the tradeoff is distance. The only hope is to continue to shorten the copper distances. And if you are going to do that, might as well run fiber all the way to the home and save the continued labor costs of reducing copper length in the loop.

[Phil @ May 9th 2006 4:46PM]

Problems with satellite Internet:

1. Latency. The sats are pretty high up. Newtonian physics require them to be over 22,000 miles above sea level to have the geostationary orbits that keep them at a fixed point in the sky. This means that the trip just from your computer to the first hop on the Internet takes over 44,000 miles vs. just a few miles for technologies like DSL. The delay in packets going back and forth is noticeable for non-practical applications (like Pinging) and for very practical applications (like any type of gaming that requires players to stay in sync.)

2. Capacity. The last time I checked, each satellite transponder (think of it as a big WiFi access point in the sky) has only 54Mbps of download bandwidth to share with EVERYONE using it. If the provider dedicates download bandwidth of 1.5Mbps for each user then they can only get 36 customers on each transponder. If a satellite has 50 transponders that's only 1800 customers and even at $80 per month that's only $144,000 per month, which is way too little to cover the total costs of the satellite and its supporting network. So what they do is say "Well, not everyone is going to need 1.5Mbps at the same time." So they put 180,000 customers on that one satellite and people start getting download performance that is worse than modem dialup. And all of that doesn't even consider upload performance.

So the latency will always be there for geostationary orbits no matter how the technology changes, meaning you are not likely to see XBox Live working over them ever. And until they can put a lot more bandwidth and/or transponders on the sats then the capacity issue will remain a problem.

AT&T has a much better chance of getting to remote areas with some version of WiMax. I just don't understand why they think they will have success in the sat space when everyone else fails. Maybe the capacity technology has improved a lot and I just missed it.

[Garrett @ May 9th 2006 9:19PM]

I have verizons FIOS service and love it! I have a 20 megabit downstream and 5megabit upstream connection! I am now waiting for their tv service and can not wait to get rid of comcrap! Fiber is the future and the more competition to offer it, the better!