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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 28 2013 @ 02:01 AM EST |
AT&T (more properly SBC dba AT&T) is pushing a marginal service,
their "U-verse"
triple-play (Wikipedia article) in what amounts to lead gleaning from
the tailings of a silver mine. The ugly questions are as follows :
- What
is the cost for the land-line ?
- What is the true cost to AT&T for
the service ?
- Where's the price comparison chart for the various
DSL-type services offered by AT&T ?
I suspect that
AT&T's profit on the U-verse bundle is in excess of 200% (two hundred
percent).
The bunkum offer I recently received from them said
"$89" per month after a discount of "$41" good for two years (24 mos.).
Then I went looking for the gotchas :
- The Internet speed tier called
"Elite" (3-6 Mbps down, .5-1 Mbps up per Wikipedia) was part of the
offer;
- Internet service had a six dollar ("$6") equipment (?)
surcharge;
- There's a data cap of "250 GB" (two hundred and fifty
gigabytes) per month;
- Other fees may apply for wireless (micro-cell)
and broadcast TV services.
In short the offer was a masterpiece of
loudly printed fluff and fine print liberally sprinkled with weasel words. And
this offer was sent to a former PBI (Pac Bell Internet) customer who has made it
clear to them that, in his opinion, THEY SUCK ! (NB - The screw-ups go
back as far as the acquisition of Pac Bell by SBC.) Talk about the left hand
not knowing about the right hand.
Open questions :
- When is
the next major expansion of AT&T's U-verse ?
- Or are they content
with cheap infill ?
- Do they have upgrade plans from FTTN(ode) to
FTTP(remises) on a general basis ?
- Or what about upgrading from
twisted-pair (UTP) to co-ax to get to 100 Mbps (hecta-megabit / sec.)
?
- Is Verizon going to continue the roughly three year hiatus (since
March 2010) on major expansions of FIOS
(Wikipedia article) ?
MB94128
P.S. I'm a
techie with a crazy quilt of training and experience. (My nerd bucket carries
a Vaco A130-2 flat-bladed screwdriver even though I'm rarely dealing with RS-232
connections these days.) I've watched Ma Bell's, and the RBOC's, byzantine
antics for more than thirty (30) years. The obvious constant over the years has
been their Newtonian resistance to change (A body at rest ...). They fumbled
their opportunity with ISDN and they are fumbling their last-mile opportunity
with fiber. QED.
P.P.S. My thanks to the various communities and
utilities that have blazed a trail of independent fiber deployments that
don't break the bank and produce good returns (cash and quality-of-life). [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 28 2013 @ 01:33 PM EST |
My post on "Gigacomm lameness..." doesn't have a hard source that says that
AT&T is abandoning their customers. They are doing it in a more subtle
fashion - a-thousand-cuts analogue that has been called "customer
discouragement". One point is in the post above - charging too much for minimal
service. Another is having a website that resembles a once flooded (*) maze and
is in dire need of a cleanup. The third is pulling various regulatory tricks
that include raising the cost of POTS from around $20 to around $30 and
weasel wording their way to more price gouging.
-
'Vint Cerf: Internet competition has
“evaporated” since dial-up' (Ars Technica article, 8 Jan.
2013)
-
AT&T said it will invest $14 billion in its
networks over the next three years, with those dollars going into wireless,
business services and the fiber-to-the-node U-verse
product.
(How much of the $14 billion will go into U-verse ?
Either whatever crumbs are left over from wireless and business services or
however much is needed as a sop to regulators.)
The premise
being that the remaining 25 percent of its customer territory will subscribe to
LTE broadband, which comes at a much higher cost and has onerous caps that DSL
access and AT&T phone lines do not have.
"Here’s AT&T’s $14B plan to kill its
copper network and leave rural America behind" (GigaOm article,
7 Nov. 2012)
-
History shows us, however, that promises made
by regulated companies today often end up as foggy memories tomorrow. We have
seen time and time again how dergulation [sic] given in exchange
for promises results in a breach of the social contract.
"Kentuckians Once Again Fighting to Keep Landlines"
(Community Broadband Networks post, 22 Feb.
2013)
-
After state legislators collected more than $1
million in campaign donations from Time Warner Cable and AT&T, the General
Assembly passed a law in 2011 that effectively barred communities from building
their own networks. These corporations are members of the American Legislative
Exchange Council, a national organization that drafts business-friendly “model
bills” to push a corporate agenda in statehouses across the
country.
"At the bottom of the broadband barrel" (The News &
Observer editorial, 28 Jan. 2013)
MB94128
* I
leave it up to the reader's imagination as to the nature or source of the flood.
Assuming potable water would, I think, be too kind to SBC dba AT&T.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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