I called to cancel U-Verse because Time Warner offers Docsis 3.0 speeds for far cheaper in the Austin area. Uverse told me that select FTTH customers can now get 24/3 instead of the previous cap of 18/1.5. They just have to send a "special" technican to upgrade my equipment. I am letting them come and try because I don't believe it.

While AT&T took the cheaper route when upgrading portions of their network to fiber to the node, the company has historically offered fiber to the home to a few locations (less than a few hundred thousand), primarily in upscale housing developments. While those lines are capable of significantly higher speeds, AT&T has traditionally capped those users at the same speed as other U-Verse users. The company told me in 2007 this was to create a "more consistent experience."

That means you have users on cutting-edge fiber infrastructure, in some places seeing downstream speeds of just 6 Mbps -- and upstream speeds of just 1.5 Mbps.

Given these past speed issues, this is why most AT&T customers will believe 1 Gbps only when it's up and running.

Today, AT&T announced that in conjunction with its previously announced Project VIP expansion of broadband access, it is prepared to build an advanced fiber optic infrastructure in Austin, Texas, capable of delivering speeds up to 1 gigabit per second. AT&T's expanded fiber plans in Austin anticipate it will be granted the same terms and conditions as Google on issues such as geographic scope of offerings, rights of way, permitting, state licenses and any investment incentives.

"If there is demand for [1 Gbps] service we will provide it," Time Warner Cable chief operating officer Rob Marcus told attendees of a conference this week while discussing Google Fiber. Speaking at the Broadcast and Cable/Multichannel News OnScreen Summit yesterday, Marcus stated that while the company may eventually have to raise speeds to compete with Google Fiber, so far the company hasn't had to.

Granted at the moment Google Fiber's footprint is minuscule. Marcus claims that Google Fiber's deployment currently only impacts about 100,000 broadband customers, and around 100,000 cable TV customers. The COO also spent plenty of time downplaying the need for 1 Gbps services, and questioning consumer demand for such speeds.

"It will be interesting to find out whether there are applications that will take advantage of a 1 Gbps service," Marcus said. "If there is, we will provide it. Our infrastructure has the ability to provide much faster speeds today. We're prepared to compete head to head with Google."

Building out the infrastructure will be expensive. In his September 17 report Still Bullish on Cable, although not blind to the risks, Goldman Sachs Telco analyst Jason Armstrong noted that if Google devoted 25% of its $4.5bn annual capex to this project, it could equip 830K homes per year, or 0.7% of US households. As such, even a 50mn household build out, which would represent less than half of all US homes, could cost as much as $70bn. We note that Jason Armstrong estimates Verizon has spent roughly $15bn to date building out its FiOS fiber network covering an area of approximately 17mn homes.

"We (sic) definitely inviting the Comcasts, the AT&T service providers to work with us on our network, and to provide their service offering on top of our pipe -- we're definitely planning on doing that. Our general attitude has been that there's plenty of room for innovation right now in the broadband space, and it's great what the cable companies are doing, upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0, but no one company has a monopoly on innovation. We're looking for other service providers to be able to come in and offer their service on top of our network so that residents have a choice when they open up their accounts. They get the connection from us, and then they have a choice as to who they subscribe to."

In other words, Verizon will cut off copper in FiOS markets first (which makes sense given the lower maintenance costs of fiber). They'll then leave users in DSL-only markets un-upgraded, forcing them to buy a costly landline so that remaining on Verizon DSL becomes less attractive. Those customers will flee to the same cable companies Verizon just signed a massive new partnership with, with Verizon planning to sell those users more expensive LTE connection later. Verizon will continue to "compete" in FiOS areas for now, if you call winking and nodding when it's time to raise prices competition.

Rural areas could see the biggest impact from the shift, as Verizon pulls DSL and instead sells those users LTE services with at a high price point ($15 per gigabyte overages). Verizon then hopes to sell those users cap-gobbling video services via their upcoming Redbox streaming video joint venture. Expect there to be plenty of gaps where rural users suddenly lose landline and DSL connectivity but can't get LTE. With Verizon and AT&T having killed off regulatory oversight in most states -- you can expect nothing to be done about it, despite both companies having been given billions in subsidies over the years to get those users online.

The entire amazing transition becomes clearer still when looking at Verizon's quarterly earnings posted yesterday. The company added a whopping 3.2 million LTE users during the second quarter, a record for the telco. In contrast, thanks to a frozen FiOS expansion (with the exception of franchise obligations in urban markets) and their disdain for DSL, Verizon managed to add just a net 2,000 broadband users in the quarter, despite adding 134,000 FiOS users. Verizon CFO Fran Shammo gave several excuses during yesterday's conference call ranging from the economy to aardvarks -- but the reality is that DSL users are fleeing in droves, and Verizon wants them to.

An anonymous reader points us to a perfect example of the technophobic attitude that has become so ingrained in Hollywood. It starts with a story in Bloomberg Businessweek about Google's pilot project in Kansas City, where they are laying fiber to bring super-high-speed internet to the community. With 922 Mbps download speeds already available in nearly a thousand homes, the topic of piracy was inevitably raised:

[Google spokeswoman Jenna] Wandres stresses that Google Fiber isn’t meant to empower pirates: “We hope higher speeds will actually make it easier to deliver and download more authorized content,” she says. Nonetheless, Howard Gantman, spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, notes that piracy is always a concern of the entertainment industry. Google Fiber “could be a great opportunity for consumers whose access to creative content is often hampered by slow speeds,” he says. But in South Korea, “the home entertainment marketplace was decimated by digital piracy” enabled by the widespread availability of high-speed Internet.

For one thing, the statement about South Korea is incredibly flimsy. The Korean music industry thrives on high-speed internet—it grew into an economic powerhouse while the country had some of the highest and earliest broadband penetration rates (and digital piracy rates) in the world. Smart Korean entrepreneurs have figured out how to succeed in the new market. Moreover, claiming that "home entertainment" as a whole was damaged by broadband is just hubris from an industry that thinks only its own products count as "entertainment".

It seems like every Hollywood statement about new technology follows the same format. "This new thing is great, but... piracy!" The problem is that they refuse to act on the first part until someone gives them a bulletproof solution to the second part—and since such a solution does not and never will exist, they ruin every attempt at a new service with ineffective restrictions and DRM schemes. Ars Technica picked up the story and spoke further to the MPAA spokesman, getting yet another "great, but..." response:

"We want to reinforce that higher speeds could be a great opportunity for consumers, and that's the bottom line," Howard Gantman, spokesman for the Motion Picture Association of America, told Ars on Friday. "There are problems that can, in terms of [an] increase of digital piracy, come with that, but we are hopeful that efforts can be made... to address digital piracy."

Someone should tell Gantman that it's not "the bottom line" if you go on to add caveats and addendums. It's also interesting that he thinks blazing fast internet only "could be" good for consumers—maybe because he knows Hollywood "could" (but won't) offer them a service that fully leverages the technology. Really what's amazing about this is that the MPAA thinks anyone cares about its opinion of fiber broadband, as if the public is going to stop and think, "Gee, I guess I'll just have to wait for faster internet access while Hollywood develops better piracy controls".

The fact that the MPAA can't get through a single statement about something as clearly positive as faster internet without bringing up reservations about piracy doesn't bode well for Hollywood's future. The studios should be getting ahead of the new technology, and making sure that everyone who gets hooked up to a new fiber network is immediately greeted with a well-made, well-priced movie service that gives them a chance to test out their speedy new connection. Instead they're probably going to watch the technology develop with caution, wait for pirates to beat them to the punch, then arrive in the market with an inferior product and complaints about how they "can't compete".

"We (sic) definitely inviting the Comcasts, the AT&T service providers to work with us on our network, and to provide their service offering on top of our pipe -- we're definitely planning on doing that. Our general attitude has been that there's plenty of room for innovation right now in the broadband space, and it's great what the cable companies are doing, upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0, but no one company has a monopoly on innovation. We're looking for other service providers to be able to come in and offer their service on top of our network so that residents have a choice when they open up their accounts. They get the connection from us, and then they have a choice as to who they subscribe to."

While that's sweet of Google, it's unclear that the nation's wealthiest carriers will want to come over and play today. These are companies who spend millions of dollars each year lobbying to eliminate competition of any kind -- and probably aren't keen to participate in a trial designed (in part) to highlight how competition keeps prices low, keeps service quality high -- and organically limits network neutrality violations. The nation's wealthiest carriers already disliked Google for the company's positions on everything from network neutrality to white space broadband. They, of course, see (correctly) that products like Google Voice pose a serious disruptive threat to traditional cash cows, and these carriers spend a lot of time smearing Google by using outsourced policy wonks.

These same carriers will probably feel even less cooperative after being subjected to several months of national coverage with one central theme: they aren't providing the broadband speeds or prices people want. Keep in mind too that part of this network's purpose will be to collect a mountain of data -- the kind of data these carriers don't like to share (congestion, bandwidth delivery costs, etc.) all of which will be useful to Google in their political battles against these same operators. While Google has repeatedly stated they aren't interested in being an ISP or in expanding this project beyond 50,000 to 500,000 users -- this new network (whenever it actually gets built) might be a more suitable playground for smaller ISPs; smaller ISPs eager to show what open access and competition can really do for a community in an environment free of the influence of the usual assortment of monopoly/duopoly carriers.

We will allow third-parties to offer their own Internet access services, or other services, using our network. We believe this approach will maximize user choice as well as spur greater innovation and competition. Most providers in Europe and many places elsewhere in the world operate open access networks. It will be open to any service provider, including incumbents and new entrants. "Open" means open.