US Telco Support → AT&T → AT&T DSL > Any plans to upgrade rural lines for increased DSL speeds?

Any plans to upgrade rural lines for increased DSL speeds?

I live in a not so rural area near Cleveland, TX (Houston area) and after years (10+) of pestering ATT and the techs on this site, I finally got DSL to my house about 3 yrs ago. I started with the Express service and now have Pro, but I'm stuck there and it seems from what the techs have told me, that the existing phone lines cannot handle the increased bandwidth.

My house is centrally located between about 4 RT's in the area that are served by fiber, but I'm just far enough away that I can't get any faster speeds, where neighbors 1/3 - 1/2 mile away are getting the faster speeds.

With the increase in demand for online services and access, are there any plans by ATT to upgrade their infrastructure in the rural areas? I know the service lines on my street are at least 40+ years old, so it seems that they would be due for an upgrade at some point.

DSL on ATT is essentially DEAD. The only upgrade you are like to see is if they upgrade your area to UVERSE.
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You have a 75% chance of being upgraded by end 2015, otherwise 25% chance HsI will be 4G LTE
»www.att.com/gen-mobile/press-roo···id=35661
99 percent of customer locations in wireline service area expected to have high-speed IP Internet access via IP wireline and/or 4G LTE

AT&T plans to expand and enhance its wireline IP network to 57 million customer locations (consumer and small business) or 75 percent of all customer locations in its wireline service area by year-end 2015. This network expansion will consist of: U-verse. AT&T plans to expand U-verse (TV, Internet, Voice over IP) by more than one-third or about 8.5 million additional customer locations, for a total potential U-verse market of 33 million customer locations¹. The expansion is expected to be essentially complete by year-end 2015. U-verse IPDSLAM. The company plans to offer U-verse IPDSLAM service (high-speed IP Internet access and VoIP) to 24 million customer locations in its wireline service area by year-end 2013. Speed Upgrades. The Project VIP plan includes an upgrade for U-verse to speeds of up to 75Mbps and for U-verse IPDSLAM to speeds of up to 45Mbps, with a path to deliver even higher speeds in the future. o In the 25 percent of AT&T's wireline customer locations where it's currently not economically feasible to build a competitive IP wireline network, the company said it will utilize its expanding 4G LTE wireless network -- as it becomes available -- to offer voice and high-speed IP Internet services. The company's 4G LTE network will cover 99 percent of all in-region customer locations. AT&T's 4G LTE network offers speeds competitive with, if not higher than, what is available on wired broadband networks today. And in many places, AT&T's 4G LTE service will be the first high speed IP broadband service available to many customers.

I would just be happy with the 3meg connection for $20 a month.
You could always get two DSL lines. ATT wont do channel bonding to give you twice the speed, but with two DSL lines you can download more at the same time.

If a neighbor has fast 20 to 50mbps cable connection you could just split the costs and use wifi or run a line between houses.
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...brought to you by Carl's Jr.

That's great for the 75% that get upgraded, but it sounds an awful lot like they plan on letting the other 25% whither up and die so they switch to LTE or cable competitors (which would be 19 million people, few of which probably will have cable as an alternative). Unfortunately LTE is still probably years away from having reasonable caps at a competitive price to DSL for most rural users.

I just got 6 Mb DSL service from At&t and am already worried about the future myself. 3 or 6 Mb will mostly be good for years to come, but there's already bad use cases like remote desktop, concurrent heavy users and HD video streaming. It's worth it to live in the country in my opinion, but I do find the whole monopoly frustrating. Once LTE is rolled out like 3G here in a few years, perhaps they'll start competing over rural users a bit via LTE.

I doubt he's getting 3 Mbs for $20, my 6 Mbs service is 35/month for 6 months and then 52/month after that. I think 3 Mbs was only $5 cheaper. 2 DSL lines without bonding is a flaky solution for anything other than concurrent heavy users. At&t has a 150 GB cap with $10 for every 50 GB over, so it's just cheaper to pay the overages on one line. Even at 3 Mbs you can potentially get something like 32 GB/day.

Any chance you could post your line stats? »192.168.1.254