Utah faints: Google Fiber to lay cable in thrilling Salt Lake City Google has confirmed it will roll out its Fiber broadband service in the Mormon heartland of Salt Lake City. The powerful California advertising giant said the Utah capital will join its neighbor Provo in offering gigabit internet connections to citizens. We assume AT&T and Comcast are already on their way over to offer a …
Whenever I see articles about Google stomping on the incumbent laggard to the acclaim of all - I had this niggling feeling that I was being duped in to cheering one billion dollar corporate behemoth over another. I felt played. Slightly impressed, but played.
Just managed to work out why I was rooting for Google.
Google make their money by you using the internet as much as possible, Comcast and their ilk make their money by charging you for it, and then wanting you not to use it.
I know why Google want me to use it, so they can scan my every page-visit, analyze my every email, and target adverts to flog me stuff for a percentage - but I buy stuff anyway, I'd see adverts (if I didn't block them), and well *shrugs* they're Google....
...htf did they make me like them..
Personalized adverts for stuff I might actually be interested in sponsoring services I actually want is WAY preferable to the old way. The old way was mounting a shredder to the mailbox, droning through undirected advertising of such low interest they had to make it up in volume - to the ruination of anything it sponsored. Five nines of waste, burning my time with so much uninteresting crud that if there had been a gem amongst the dross I'd have never seen it.
That's when AT&T was broken up, forcibly by the Justice Department in the landmark antitrust lawsuit.
Utah fell under the auspices of Mountain Bell, one of 8 "Regional Bell Operating Companys" that were left in the aftermath of the verdict.
Mountain Bell, known later in life as USWest, was purchased by Qwest in 2000 and Qwest thereafter sold to Centurylink in 2011. This company, regardles of name, funneled TENS if not HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS into lobbying for, and advertizing their own legislation that, when passed, sumarily denied Salt Lake City proper from even being able to consider or vote upon being part of this much better network.
A well known, and respectable local ISP in the Salt Lake City area, Xmission.com, has a topical blog post about Centurylink's tactics.
https://xmission.com/blog/2012/02/24/response-to-centurylink-on-property-node-placement
The owner, received a letter from Centurylink, stating they wanted to use part of his privately owned property where he lives as an ideal location "for a network remote node DSLAM to provide faster internet service to your neighborhood'. He not only rejected their offer of money, but then created a media stink about how his ISP, Xmission, could _not_ utilize the same remote terminal DSLAMs as Qwest could, to provide faster, competitive internet, to his customers.
Xmission is only one of NINE different providers to choose from, for fast and useful Internet if you subscribe to UTOPIA - if you are able. Most households have TWO : Centurylink and Comcast for anything faster than best effort 7-12 megabits.
Xmission, and most other UTOPIA ISPs provide uncapped, unmetered 100 and 1000mbit services via this network. Businesses are able to subscribe upto 10gigabits.
All a residential account has to do, is pay ~ $3000 for the fiber and installation, and you get very cheap service thereafter. Adding it to your house increases its resale value by thousands. You can even opt to amortize this amount into a larger monthly fee for a few years to pay off the construction costs. 100% fair and equitable.
Xmission _is_ and _will continue to be forever, as a service to their customers_ a Centurylink partner and PPPoE realm auth / gateway to the internet, available to all Utah customers as a third party ISP option if you sign up for Centurylink DSL... But not the nice, fast VDSL2 standar, only central-office-provisioned, slow, noisy, ADSL2 is available to resellers.
Centurylink CLAIMS that Denver is a "Gig City". All they give a hoot about is the ability to advertize such, without providing the service to any appreciable amountn of the population. They've publicially admitted that ONLY the City and County of Denver, proper, will receive the service, and, only in very specific areas. Namely all the new condo and apartment towers being built near our new multi-modal transit station.
Another independant ISP, here in Denver, Forethought.net, is ACTUALLY WIRING EXISTING BUILDINGS for Gigabit, and ofcourse gets hardly a media mention - because they don't have millions of subscriber fees to put towards their ad budget. Amazing what actually funneling fees into NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE instead of ADVERTS can accomplish!
So, before you start any more rumors about how AT&T is about to start advertizing in Utah, give Centurylink credit for being the same bloody gits that AT&T have always been. The split-up was merely a 30 year hiatus, until status-quo returned. Bloody incumbents.
"That's when AT&T was broken up, forcibly by the Justice Department in the landmark antitrust lawsuit."
In case you've been asleep for the last 30 years: AT&T has reassembled itself over that period via a bunch of holding companies and a couple of renames, regained local loop monopolies over most of the USA and is no longer bound by that pesky 1930's "universal service for all" settlement.
Take a closer look at that man behind the curtain.
No, I have not been asleep. My view of the divesture, and then re-merging, of many companies that provide the in-ground wireline-to-residences services, and the point I am attempting to make, is quite sound:
AT&T, even with merging tons of companies over the last decades, more recently Southwestern Bell/SBC, Pacbell, SNET and others, DOES NOT have local-loop wireline infrastructure to houses in Utah.
Certainly, AT&T has re-formed, about 80% of what it once was. But there are stalwart former-baby-bells that will, very likely, not re-merge with AT&T: Centurylink, Cincinatti Bell, Verizon, among few others.
AT&T have not merged their way back into Utah - the point I was making.
Instead, Centurylink (through multiple divestures and mergers) now owns the Incumbent Git spot in Utah, and AT&T will never see wireline to houses in Utah, likely ever again.
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