Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference today, AT&T CEO Randal Stephenson stated that the company will be launching their 1 Gbps "Gigapower" U-Verse tier somewhere in the Dallas area starting this summer. AT&T's Gigapower service currently only exists in select portions of Austin, providing users with speeds of 300 Mbps. It will be bumped to 1 Gbps in that region sometime later this year.
"We are redirecting VIP investment to fiber to the home deployment, and in fact we are going to launch the service in Dallas this summer," stated Stephenson.
"...You are going to see other communities as we begin to deploy this technology emerge around the United States," said the CEO, adding that the company was going to be a "little more aggressive and assertive in deploying that technology around the country."
The Austin launch was a direct response to Google Fiber's arrival in the Austin area. Whereas Google charges $70 for symmetrical 1 Gbps, AT&T is charging users $100 a month for symmetrical 1 Gbps speeds (when they arrive), unless users are willing to have their online behavior tracked and monetized, in which case they'll pay $70 (plus install fees and an ETF).
Before AT&T customers get too excited, AT&T hasn't once released any meaningful statistics on exactly how many customers they intend to reach with this significantly-faster service. AT&T primarily appears to be taking their existing fiber to the home deployments -- which they've always historically offered in select upscale housing developments but capped at slower DSL speeds -- and has started bumping those limited users to faster speeds.
As such this is more of a PR response to Google Fiber in their home state than a significant deployment, as AT&T continues to promise investors that any money spent on GigaPower will not meaningfully impact CAPEX or spending (read: it's mostly already installed at said developments and requires little effort to enable). Stephenson stated that more detail would be made available on the Dallas deployment sometime later this year.
