AT&T distanced its 1-Gbps network plans for Austin,...
AT&T distanced its 1-Gbps network plans for Austin, Texas (CD April 10 p10), from the announcement that Google Fiber will be building there. “That was not in response to Google’s announcement,” said Bill Smith, the telco’s president of network operations,…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
at the Jefferies 2013 Global Technology, Media & Telecom Conference last week. “We had a team suit up and had been, you know, developing that plan for some time. [Google] accelerated our need to go public with it a little bit. But we had been planning to do that.” AT&T issued a press release hours after Google Fiber’s Austin announcement, promising a gigabit network in Austin conditioned on receiving similar regulatory treatment as Google. Smith called Austin a “great market” with lots of high-tech businesses. AT&T doesn’t see gigabit speeds as “anything new” and has “had that tool in our toolkit,” he said. He doesn’t think people need gigabit speeds today or “in the near term,” he added. “I have yet to have a customer complain that our U-verse network didn’t give them the speed they needed.”