AT&T Unveils Their 75 Mbps U-Verse Tier → As always....

They will do it (CenturyLink), you just have to keep bugging them. I have 40/5 via pair-bonding on a residential account and it's been working like a champ for two years now

They've been in pending merger mode for most of the year, and yet they completed the herculean task of upgrading the LA and NY areas. While a couple of cities may seem minuscule on paper, the number of customers in those areas is pretty massive. Between the LA, Orange County, and Ventura County areas that they consider the "Los Angeles" market, there's probably some 10-15 million people upgraded to MAXX on the left coast.

There was also a recent post by a TWC customer with an offer to join a trial of a next-gen DVR. It seems they're also trying to get their TV experience up to snuff. There are also quite a few reports of expanded channel bonding. 8 channels down would let them bump up to the intermediate step of 100/5 before MAXX hits like they did in LA/NY.

I can't say I really understand why, but the merger seems to be motivating them to do more, not less.

So true. I live in a country with a marginally less backward telco, but even they are offering 80/20 on a single pair (and any VDSL2 modem works fine, AND you can choose from 20 or 30 ISPs that run on their network). The nodes/cabinets are designed to be within a few hundred metres of homes, usually co-sited with the existing copper distribution cabinets.

Where they offer FTTP, then they'll sell you 330Mbit at a reasonable price

You just kept calling the sales number and they gave in?

Yep, and Video is top priority behind phone service in QoS, so you have to be provisioned for 75Mbps, but each HD stream uses around 6Mbps (unless it's changed since I was U-verse Tier 2) so 24Mbps total pulled from your 75Mbps for HD streams (51Mbps total while 4 devices are streaming HD)

The VRAD should have a 10Gbps connection, however they hold over 200 customers, so get 100 customers running 75Mbps and you can kiss your "smooth experience" goodbye for the whole neighborhood, of course like I said, unless it's changed since I worked Tier 2 for U-verse

I still get AT&T solicitors at my door....

AT&T: "Hello, and good evening! We are going door to door to inform people about AT&T's fiber based networks! What internet provider are you currently using:

Me: "TWC MAXX, 300 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up"

AT&T: (who actually said this) "Oh. I see. And is the speed a deal breaker for you?"

AT&T: (quickly moving on) "Have you heard about our television service, we are the cheapest provider in this area and can most certainly give you a deal"

Me: "No thanks, the roof antenna and Netflix serve me just fine. Unless you can beat the Netflix price of $8 a month and the $0 a month I pay for that antenna, I don't think you can help me."

AT&T: "Have a great evening sir!

At least they were polite and not pushy

That could also be due to their own wiring, or the drop to their house. Issues like that could be very localized and fixable.

My pair-bonded 45Mbps connection is quite rock solid. So, not sure what you mean by 'right'. Distance is always an issue. End of story. Yes, fiber needs to show up to put these problems to bed. But, suck it up because it is going to be at least 8-10 years before we see 80% FTTP. So, if you can get pair-bonding and vectoring and phantom-mode over copper, be happy. Don't hold your breath for fiber.

I just tell them to go away and come back when they've rolled out their GigaPower service to my neighborhood.

>implying the grannies that use AT&T will ever use 75 Mbps

This service is for the 1%. The power user. The elite.

They could provision us at 1 Gbps with a 10 Gbps connection feeding all 200+ subscribers on the VRAD and us power users would still never bump into each other.

What is with all the constant butthurt from you? When I had AT&T's 45 Mbps tier the two pairs worked perfectly.

What they should just do is force the customer to sign a 3-year contract for FTTH and if they break the contract the early termination fee is $1,000.

Then they run a fiber line to the customer's home.

I am on pair-bond 45/6 also and it runs great. RG syncs both lines really good.

This is true. I've been thinking about testing it due to being fed up with AT&T; maybe I'll get lucky.
The line drop hypothesis might actually be it; most of the people don't even know what "coax" means let alone interference and signal quality.
Every customer that got Charter on my street had some people trenching, so I think the drop is fresh. Probably the wiring in their house.

Mmmm.. New 3GHz Coax.. Nom Nom Nom..

At least I hope what they're dropping is that good.

Would it be that hard to take the VRAD from 1 gig to 10 gig ?

How about VZ DSL? The max speed here is 7mbps and that's living right up against the CO! Yes its an ADSL2+ DSLAM out of a FIOS-serving CO (no FIOS in the area around the CO) but VZ bean counters have capped the max DSL speed for no reason.

My loop out of the CO can do up to "5mbps" but when I had service they would not sell higher than 3mbps. Its 2000 feet to the crossbox, and then .6 miles to the CO directly.

Being able to get 20/1 would be like heaven, having a realistic decent performing choice over Comcast's 30/6.

If they put a RT at the crossbox (or used the dark fiber already in the ground in my backyard) then I could probably see nice speeds like that. But no.

Oops duplicate post...

If it's fiber-fed, it's as easy as swapping out a card and/or GBIC. They could stick a 40GigE card in it, but they're still a bit pricy.

And much of Ohio needs to be rebuilt before it can even handle the 8x4 channels. And upgrading now means nothing. But its more like turning on what was already put in before. Hell even the Adelphia network was Doc2 and was treated as 1.0 and 1.1 when TWC took over. TWC is in no hurry to do anything.

at that point its aDSL or IPDSL. and what's the problem? The service is up to and not all speeds are available to everyone. Everyone knows how DSL works who actually cares to understand its not dedicated and its distance limited.

This is completely inaccurate, AT&T could NOT provision you at 1Gbps out of 10Gbps and not cause issues on the VRAD, I'd know, I supported U-verse for 3 years as a Tier 2 agent, and specifically as almost Tier 3 on these forums for U-verse (Check out my reviews) AT&T pipes all your services through the VRAD, TV/Phone/Internet, unless things have changed 1 HD stream uses 6Mbps, so 24Mbps for TV per home, or 6Gbps per VRAD with 250 customers on that VRAD, (Average holds 248 so I rounded) that doesn't even include SD streams, VoIP, and other people's internet bandwidth.

QoS for AT&T U-verse goes like this VoIP #1 priority, TV #2 priority, Internet #3 priority... So with that being said, EVEN IF you could get 1Gbps at your house, AND your line could handle it because the VRAD was in your front yard, what would be the point? As soon as your neighbors started watching HD streams you'd start seeing slower speeds... And if you were somehow actually utilizing at least 90% of that bandwidth, you would be the one losing speed, plus causing issues for the rest of the neighborhood (See people's issues in these forums with glitchy fast moving videos while downloading huge files)

Plain and simple, if you want that kind of service at home, then AT&T needs to stop with the lolly gagging and start building FTTP throughout 100% of their footprint, just like every other ISP available, playing around with copper just isn't the way of the future anymore, and with the current speeds most ISP's offer these days this could be done over the next few years with moderate investment and upgrades while people are still not even utilizing 300Mbps...

See I see the copper networks just like some people here see wireless spectrum, there needs to be "use it or lose it" laws in effect, not willing to upgrade to fiber? Keeping the same speeds for years? Cool, you just lost your infrastructure, file for bankruptcy and have a nice day, because we don't want you around anymore since you refuse to compete or let others offer services on the infrastructure....

All carrier access nodes are designed to be oversubscribed on purpose. They build based on the 95 percentile usage pattern. The standard U-verse VRAD is only provisioned with 3x1Gbps uplinks anyway. You are forgetting to factor in multicast efficiency for all those video streams, as only one video stream has to be forwarded per active channel being watched/recorded, no matter how many customers are watching simultaneously off the same VRAD. Additionally you did not account for the fact not all customers are streaming and watching all 4 streams simultaneously.

But, in reality, Gigapower uses an upgraded VRAD design with (10G/WDM)PON cards anyway. Off hand I am not aware of the standard uplink bandwidth for a Gigapower enabled VRAD but my guess is that it jumps to a pair of 10Gig uplinks for resiliency, reduced uplink port capacity and reduced long haul fiber requirements. Each (10G/WDM)PON card is subscribed at 16:1. I assume they have to be doing WDM on the uplink to the VRAD to be able to provision 1Gig upstream to each customer while everyone on the same card just shares the aggregate 10Gig port bandwidth downstream. I still haven't gathered all the details on the particular cards/optical technology they are using.