AT&T U-verse → Re: Still hope? Maybe FTTH?

They don’t care if it’s the only form of internet. This was a company wide decision not to sell ATM DSL across the entire footprint. They want DSL & POTS gone.

Also, there is no reason why “UVERSE” would be any worse. You’ve said they claim to offer up to 50, so you’re close to a DSLAM that even with “decrepit” lines, you’d still receive better service than you do now. The IPDSLAMs can revert back to ADSL2+ and they can easily drop down the profile.

As for the way things are done in SC, I don’t think it’s really any different than the rest of the former BellSouth territory.

You’re talking about more “rural” areas in upstate SC which AT&T doesn’t care about.

No different than here. Most of the rural south is the same way until you get into the suburbs of a major metro.

We have a VRAD here, so I would imagine that doesn't drop down profiles, anyway I don't want to pay 10/mo for their lousy gateway. LOLExcept there's one problem with that statement. We are NOT rural.
The city of Anderson has a population of about 28,000
and just outside of the city limits it is a fairly dense suburban ring with many more people and much higher incomes and lakeside communities with super high income levels. Essentially we are a bedroom community of the greater
GSP area with city limit population of 400k not even considering the suburbs.

Lindsey Graham is part of the problem I think the guy enables them to do whatever, but in return
they do things like provide ATM ADSL for communities near where he lives in the upstate. No kidding.
Lindsey is in their back pocket.

I have been impressed with what WCTEL has accomplished in McCormick and other non-urban counties. My sister has FTTH with VOIP, ipTV, and synchronous broadband from her telephone cooperative, Western Carolina Telephone Cooperative (WCTEL).

Blue Ridge Electric Co-op is partnering with WCFIBER (WCTEL subsidiary) to bring gigabit services to its electrical service areas. »www.gigupblueridge.com/

Hi there friend, I was thinking about you as I made my previous post above for mt999999. Maybe you have some thoughts he says he might consider moving down here at some point. See my post above. Thanks.

Some limited areas here in the upstate have Blue Ridge Electric Co-op as the provider. I used to live in one area near the town of Pendleton. The cable outlet there was FamilyView Cablevision now bought out by Vyve.(Formerly Northland Communications) So

As you noted, Family View had service territory pockets in Anderson and Pickens counties. They also had a few student MDU complexes. They were a responsive and helpful provider from all of those that I have heard critiques.

I am seeing mixed remarks on Vyve and early reports have been poor with too many service outages and packet loss syndrome. Their Northland segment has problematic student MDU complexes.

Here’s more 411 on the ownership changes.
»www.prnewswire.com/news- ··· 044.html
»vyvebroadband.com/blog/2 ··· oadband/
»www.broadbandtechreport. ··· levision

The Vyve livery and electronic billboards are eye catching and they are competing with political flyers for space in my USPS receptacle, so there’s that going for them.

28k is a small city. I'm not far behind you with our city having about 20k or so people. As the kids say about our city, "it's BFE bro" , but it's just outside of a major metro. I guess I wrongly look at small cities as being rural, even though that's not technically the case. I guess I associate small town friendliness as rural.

I am not sure the exact distance from Anderson, but I have family in Pickens County, SC and it seems their broadband situation is much worse than yours though.

They just bought a 2 year old home and the previous owners had to use ViaSat. They have NO cable within a mile, and AT&T only offers POTS service. We tried to get them on business ADSL like their neighbors had but no dice.

They get very poor cell signal, only AT&T seems reliable. I ended up setting them up with an unlimited hotspot plan I have grandfathered with AT&T and a regular POTS line. Had to get creative with the Yagi setup, but they're able to get a consistent 25/5.

We called the cable company (northland?) and they don't have any plans to extend the plant currently, but at over a mile away, it's not feasible for them to pay out of pocket.

They had AT&T Fiber when they lived near Charleston, so this is a definite change for them....

The upstate area is literally a whole world away from the coast of SC.

As you can see things are rough when it comes to decent internet offerings if you can find that at all depending on the topography and things like forest.

Thing is the money in this area isn't really to be found in most of Anderson although there are pockets of high income areas, that is to be found just outside of the limits in the surrounding burbs which are pretty dense, and the lakeside communities which also have decent density of homes.

The outlying areas which I think are more desirable to live in because you can buy more land for less money have sat or if you are lucky a WISP which are rare here, and of course you need a very good antenna but that also means that during bad weather, and wind, trees ect you might lose that signal quite often.

It's really a sort of no mans land with all utilities a dozen miles from Greenville, headed west and south until you reach Asheville, or Columbia. Places like
Liberty, Pickens, Wallhalla, Seneca, Anderson, Greenwood are totally underserved with dilapidated utility infrastructure including power!

But it's odd because a lot of companies are moving here at the same time for various things including manufacturing in a big way. Employers like Bosch and former subsidiary AFCO paid T a literal fortune for slower speed VDSL for years until they finally built out FTTP and paid even more.lol The prices were so high that AFCO told T to take a leap and got Charter business service, which kind of sucked but was reasonably priced.

Northland Communications (Now Vyve) is a horrible tier two provider with nothing but problems (read their reviews from the Seneca, SC office on google) and since they were bought out by Vyve things have gotten even worse if that is possible. You'd think the system was held together with scotch tape and bubblegum.

FamilyView Cablevision was a mom and pop tier three outfit which only served a very small area of Anderson, Pendleton, and Clemson, but the guy that owned it was tireless, and a excellent engineer, he did much of the actual technical work, but he was too old to keep it going and the children didn't want to take over so he sold out to Vyve last year. I bet things will quickly fall apart there sadly.

It's really beautiful here with the lakes but the infrastructure is horrible, as in nearly third world quality, and doesn't seem to be improving.

Yeah, T has recently been laying a good bit of fiber through Liberty, SC but they seem to be doing it to connect Commerse park and some of the schools and maybe Cell sights. While egnorring homes, and apartments.

This. Same thing in the Clemson, Seneca, Pendleton, Anderson areas.
there are plenty of T fiber lines passing through many communities but it must all be for business or cell tower backhaul, even Spirit Telecom (now Segra) has lines here, but again it must be backhaul things.

ATT (ex-BS area) is trenching residential fiber out from where they previous ran it for businesses. Nothing like it was before i.e. a spool of fiber on every street corner, but they are slowly deploying residential fiber again. I never thought I would see them trenching again.

You're seeing this in the upstate area of SC outside of Greenville, or Asheville?
That would surprise the heck out of me, as I have NEVER seen any evidence of
residential FTTH anywhere in this general region.

No, just adding a general data point to the "I've heard from techs in multiple areas that AT&T is doing mass hiring for their fiber expansion." Like i said, ATT is working directly off from where they stopped last time. ATT trenched fiber through with qtips/handholes; now they are filling in residential along that path so far.

ATT's network appears to be failing here which is why they might be working again. Their "solution" to fixing VRAD's has been to just remove all the addresses serviced by it from their database to prevent new orders.

I wish that somebody else would buy out AT&T here in our area, they clearly aren't interested in serving the area anymore and really haven't been for a around a decade. We have a couple of regional providers nearby in the midlands and coastal areas that might actually want to compete for business here.