When AT&T first launched gigabit service in the Austin market, the company boldly denied the obvious: that it was responding to competitive pressure from Google Fiber. And when the company suddenly and magically drops the price of its gigabit service from $120 to $70 in Google Fiber markets, AT&T denies that Google Fiber had anything to do with it. These launches and price reductions are, AT&T executives will consistently claim, simply coincidental -- and AT&T was always planning to offer gigabit speeds for $70 per month.
As AT&T pushes into markets like Huntsville, Alabama and Louisville Kentucky in obvious response to Google Fiber announcements, AT&T execs continue to pretend that Google Fiber has nothing to do with it.
In Louisville, where AT&T has sued the city for making pole attachment easier for companies like Google Fiber, the telco tells local news outlets like WFPL that Google Fiber has nothing to do with the company's gigabit launch plans.
“The difference is, we’re doing it, we’re here today, we’re providing service to homes, we’re selling it and we want to get as many people on our network as possible,” Hood Harris, president of AT&T Kentucky, tells the paper. “That’s what driving what we’re doing."
Unmentioned of course is that Google Fiber might be already building a network in Louisville if not for AT&T's lawsuit. Or that AT&T may never have even began offering gigabit speeds if Google Fiber hadn't highlighted the lack of next-gen speeds in most markets.
In Huntsville, the city government is building its own open access municipal broadband network and will invite multiple ISPs (including Google Fiber) to come in and compete for consumer attention. But there too, AT&T Alabama president Fred McCallum tells local news outlets that Google Fiber had nothing to do with their decision to offer limited gigabit services in the market:
quote:
Q: Is Huntsville specifically the first of the four big Alabama metropolitan areas because of the competition that is expected and the competition that is already in the market?A: No. We are deploying our network that's called a GPON (gigabit passive optical) network all across the state, and Huntsville is just happening to get ready first, and we happened to get the number of units ready here that we could launch the service, and so we chose to come to Huntsville first. I'm excited that we can come to Huntsville first, because this city is certainly the technology hub of our state, so we're glad to be here. It's natural that we're here, and it's a great day for us.
Of course consumers don't care if AT&T can admit that a search engine is forcing it to actually upgrade its network (even if gigabit deployment by both companies remains patchy at best). When Google Fiber enters an AT&T gigabit launch market, the company consistently drops its prices by
as much as $50 per month.