ImOn Communications, a fiber-to-the-premises telecom services provider based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa,  said Thursday that it has agreed to be purchased by a unit within Goldman Sachs Assets Management, a deal that it says will help fund its expansion into surrounding areas. Terms were not disclosed.

ImOn was founded in 2007 as a single-market cable provider and today owns and operates a 2,000-mile FTTP platform that reaches more than 60,000 homes and businesses, providing advanced broadband services, digital TV, high-speed Internet, and phone services to customers in Cedar Rapids, Marion, Hiawatha, Iowa City, and Dubuque, Iowa.  

“The ImOn team is thrilled to be working with Goldman Sachs,” ImOn founder and CEO Patrice Carroll said in a press release. “Goldman Sachs shares our values and supports ImOn’s vision. They will be a great partner to help us implement our ambitious growth plans.”

Goldman Sachs Asset Management has long been a supporter of infrastructure companies, with past investments in CityFibre, UK’s largest independent Full Fiber infrastructure platform, and Global Compute, a global data center platform.

"Increasing usage and reliance on broadband connectivity by households and businesses create a highly attractive growth opportunity for ImOn to deploy FTTP infrastructure,” Leonard Seevers, a Partner leading digital infrastructure investing within Goldman Sachs Asset Management, said in a press release. “We are incredibly excited to partner with Patrice and the rest of the ImOn management team, and to be ImOn’s strategic and capital partner as it executes this next phase of growth.”

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2022 and is subject to obtaining customary regulatory approvals. 

ImOn was advised by Bank Street Group, Shuttleworth & Ingersoll, and Morgan Lewis & Bockius. Goldman Sachs Asset Management was advised by TD Securities and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. TD Securities also served as Lead Arranger on the debt financing for the transaction.

About two months after saying it was pursuing the creation of a new joint venture to build out fiber networks within and adjacent to its existing footprint, Cable One officially unveiled the effort -- Clearview Fiber -- adding that it has signed on investment firms GTCR, Stephens Capital and The Pritzker Organization as financing partners for the JV.

Cable One said it was pursuing the JV -- which includes its Clearwave Communications fiber assets and certain fiber assets of Hargray Communications -- in November. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing at the time, Cable One said the JV also included certain unaffiliated third-party investors, but declined to name them.

According to a press release January 3, Cable One said the Clearwave Fiber venture is committed to “provide fast and reliable connectivity via FTTP [fiber-to-the-premises] internet to underserved markets and will allow for more rapid expansion of fiber internet to homes and businesses in small cities and big towns.”

Cable One owns a majority of the JV, and said investors will make “substantial cash investments” to support its expansion. Clearwave Fiber will be led by executive chairman Michael Gottdenker and CEO David Armistead, both of whom were part of Hargray’s executive leadership team from 2007 until its 2021 sale to Cable One.  

“This strategic investment will help accelerate the deployment of fiber-based broadband services to a range of markets, including underserved areas of the country,” Gottdenker said in a press release. “Our team is motivated by our shared core values of customer service and improving lives through connectivity and is excited to bring fast and reliable Clearwave Fiber broadband to homes and businesses across the country. We are thrilled to welcome GTCR, Stephens, and TPO to the Clearwave Fiber family and look forward to our continued partnership with Cable One.”

GTCR has been a long-time investor in the cable space and has been a frequent partner of Cable One in various deals. In 2019 it purchased Vyve Broadband with Mega Broadband Investments, selling a 45% interest in the company to Cable One about a year later for $547.1 million.  GTCR formed Rural Broadband Investments in 2013, buying several small cable operators -- including New Wave Communications  -- and was sold to Cable One in 2017. 

Pritzker and Stephens Capital were investors in Hargray, which Cable One bought in 2021. 

Cable One did not quantify how large the investment in Clearwave Fiber will be, but said its own contributions to the JV represent about 3% of its consolidated revenue in Q3 2021.  According to its financial statements, Cable One had Q3 total revenue of $430.2 million, meaning its investment in the Clearwave JV is about $13 million.

“We look forward to supporting and sharing in Clearwave Fiber’s growth over the coming years while remaining focused on our primary business, increasing penetration rates, integrating recently acquired companies and driving higher margins and greater free cash flow,” Cable One CEO Julie Laulis said in a press release. “We did not take lightly our choice of partners in this transaction and are excited to be working with like-minded individuals who share our core principles.”

Bank Street Group acted as lead financial advisor to Cable One, and Ernst & Young advised on the financial and operational carve-out of Clearwave Fiber. Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP and Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP acted as legal advisors to Cable One. Kirkland & Ellis LLP, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP and Covington & Burling LLP acted as legal advisors to the investors on this transaction. ■

Point Broadband, a high-speed internet service provider based in West Point, Georgia, said it has received an investment from private equity firm GTCR to help accelerate its expansion plans. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Point Broadband was founded in 2017 and offers fiber-to-the-premises broadband service to residential and business customers in several markets east of the Mississippi River. The company said it is actively expanding its footprint via FTTP builds in near adjacent markets,  and that the investment from GTCR will help accelerate plans to expand its network into underserved communities. 

"GTCR's strategic investment will help accelerate the deployment of our fiber-based broadband solutions to a range of markets, including small town USA and rural America," Point Broadband co-founder and CEO Todd Holt said in a press release. "GTCR shares our core values of customer service and community engagement and has a proven track record of deploying capital to build state-of-the-art broadband networks. We are excited to welcome GTCR to the Point Broadband family as we enter our next phase of growth."

Stifel served as lead financial advisor and Houlihan Lokey served as co-financial advisor to Point Broadband. Credit Suisse and Rothschild & Co. served as financial advisors and Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as legal advisor to GTCR.

"Point Broadband has a strong focus on best-in-class customer service supported by a localized presence in the communities they serve, and we believe Point is well-positioned to serve the growing demand for broadband services in markets across the nation," GTCR managing director Mark Anderson said in a press release. 

The Nationwide hunger for bigger and better broadband is leading to a major consolidation of fiber-optic networks across the country, as private-equity players, telcos and cable operators scramble to feed the need for speed.

For cable operators, the decision to build or buy fiber capacity is a tricky one, weighing the cost and time associated with digging trenches and laying fiber lines against purchasing an existing network and integrating it into their own operations. But as customer demand for higher and higher speeds grows and the number of available network operators starts to dwindle, many companies are taking the second option, buying up regional carriers to beef up their offerings and driving take-out multiples skyward.

Over the past seven years, the fiber business has changed dramatically from an industry dotted with dozens of smaller players with limited access to capital to one dominated by a core of about nine well-financed, highly motivated companies looking to increase their holdings as quickly and as robustly as they can.

Driving most of that consolidation is the perception that fiber — those sheathed glass filaments that deliver blindingly fast internet speeds via pulses of light — is more in demand than ever.

Gigabit Rollouts, Commercial Pushes

Over the past five years, broadband has overtaken video as the top revenue producer at nearly every U.S. cable company. And just as quickly, broadband speeds have quadrupled in the past five years from an average of 25 Megabits per second to more than 100 Mbps. Today, many operators are increasingly making available 1 Gigabit-per-second services, which require fiber to go deeper into the network. Add to the mix the evolving commercial-services business — where fiber connections for enterprise clients are the rule — and the advent of 5G wireless services, which use small cells that need to be connected via fiber lines, and demand is expected to balloon.

Crown Castle International, a communications services provider with 70,000 route miles of fiber, 65,000 small cells and more than 40,000 towers across the country, also believes that 5G will present a big opportunity for fiber companies.

“[W]e believe the network infrastructure needed to support 5G will dramatically increase the demand for our tower and fiber assets over time,” Crown Castle CEO Jay Brown said on the company’s April 18 first-quarter earnings conference call. “It is truly an exciting time in our industry. And in many ways, it reminds me of several other points in time over the past two decades as we are currently benefiting from the significant ongoing investment in today’s networks while also looking forward with great anticipation of what lies ahead.

“How exactly the investment in 5G ultimately transforms the way we live and work is yet to be determined,” Brown continued. “But if past is prologue, I suspect most are underestimating the magnitude of the change and the corresponding opportunity for us.”

According to Deloitte, there will be a need for $130 billion to $150 billion in fiber infrastructure investment by 2022 to support broadband competition, rural coverage and wireless densification.

Much of the traffic currently traveling over broadband lines is video and, per Deloitte, streaming video and augmented and virtual reality will continue to put a strain on existing infrastructure. The researcher estimated traffic would rise at an estimated compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 181% through 2020. Add to that the expected massive increase in devices in the home — research house Gartner has estimated that affluent homes could have as many as 500 connected devices by 2022 — and WiFi and cellular networks could be pressured nearly to the breaking point.

“Without sufficient fiber networks, innovation in new use cases, new applications and new devices will likely be stifled,” Deloitte wrote. “Deep fiber deployment is the crux of the new capacity required, including fiber to the home/business and fiber backhaul to support wireless densification.”

Rising Demand, Without 5G

CoBank, which provides loans, leases and other financial services to agribusiness and rural infrastructure in all 50 states, predicts that new network architectures and applications will increase data traffic by 65% over the next three years. And that doesn’t even account for 5G, the ultra-high-speed wireless data technology that is expected to usher in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) and autonomous vehicles, which requires extensive fiber connections between its network of transmitters.

All of this has led to a near feeding frenzy over fiber by large infrastructure funds, private-equity investors and strategic buyers. Since 2014, private-equity players such as Crown Castle, Zayo and EQT Infrastructure have bought up small fiber providers, connecting their networks to offer regional service.

Seeing an untapped opportunity, other financial players were attracted to the business:

● Macquarie Infrastructure Partners, in conjunction with Uniti Group, announced plans to acquire Bluebird Network;
● EQT took a majority stake in Spirit Communications, connecting it with an earlier acquisition, Lumos Networks, for a fiber network between Pittsburgh and Atlanta;
● And Paris-based Antin Infrastructure Partners bought FirstLight Fiber, a Northeast provider of fiber-optic data, internet, data center and cloud services to enterprise and carrier customers.

Now the consolidators are consolidating. Earlier this month Zayo Group, one of the largest players in the fiber industry with more than 130,000 U.S. route miles of fiber, agreed to be purchased by Stockholm, Sweden-based EQT Infrastructure and Digital Colony for $14.3 billion in cash.

CoBank expects the frenzy to slow down a bit as national fiber network firms have been swallowed up by larger entities. But that could open the door further for smaller deals between regional local-exchange carriers (RLECs) and cable operators, CoBank lead communications economist Jeff Johnston said in an interview.

“As far as any meaningful deals are concerned, the reality is there are just not a lot of assets out there left to be acquired by infrastructure funds or the likes of [RCN parent] TPG that look at rolling up a lot of these regional cable operators,” Johnston said. “It’s our opinion where we could potentially see as a next step in this whole consolidation wave is the much smaller regional RLECs and cable companies that have built out fiber footprints can become attractive take-out candidates for some of these investors, as they seem to have an insatiable demand for fiber right now.”

Already, small cable operators have had their eyes on regional fiber companies. In April, Cable One agreed to purchase Fidelity Communications for $529.5 million in cash, and in November it purchased Clearwave Communications for $358.8 million. Both companies have differences — Fidelity provides residential video and broadband service to more than 100,000 homes and 20,000 businesses, while Clearwave offers regional fiber service in Southern Illinois — and similarities, as both have extensive fiber networks. Fidelity derives more than half of its revenue from broadband and has a 1,600 route-mile fiber network.

Cable One chairman and CEO Julia Laulis said the Missouri-based Fidelity fills in gaps in the cable operator’s coverage. “Fidelity, if you think about a doughnut, there’s sort of a hole in the middle of us, they’re in Missouri, Illinois, they’re in Texas, Louisiana and Oklahoma,” Laulis said on the cable firm’s first-quarter analyst call. “So they are just like in all-around Cable One markets.”

Clearwave, which has 2,400 route miles of dense fiber, gives Cable One additional capacity and the ability to offer more robust business services. In Cable One’s Q4 earnings call, Laulis touted Clearwave’s fiber network, its proximity to Cable One markets and its lineup of enterprise customers.“There’s a lot to be excited about with Clearwave,” she said.

Said Johnston: “I definitely think that we’ll continue to see the small regional deals that we have seen so far, whether it’s just a diversification play, scale or just owning an asset that is appreciating in value. Those or some of the drivers that are behind what we are seeing now.”

Cable One isn’t the only cable operator with its sights on fiber:

● In October, midsized operator Atlantic Broadband bought South Florida fiber company FiberLight for an undisclosed sum, adding 350 route miles of fiber to its network in that state.
● In January, Vast Broadband bought NTS Communications, adding 2,700 route miles to its fiber network in Texas and Louisiana.
● And in March, Schurz Communications purchased Vermont municipal fiber carrier Burlington Telecom for $30.8 million.

“It is probably safe to assume we’ll see more,” senior Kagan research analyst Tony Lenoir said.

One of those buyers could be Atlantic Broadband. “We do both [build and buy]. I think we will be more aggressive on buying now,” ABB vice president of business sales Gerardo Garza said in an interview, adding that with a purchase, the operator gets the added benefit of an existing revenue stream and an embedded customer base.

Already, he said the FiberLight purchase is paying off in additional customers and capabilities.

“Now we are a player in the entire South Florida market, which is one of the biggest markets in the U.S.,” Garza said, adding that the deal put ABB closer to several thousand more customers and opened the door to serve larger enterprises.

Future deals are likely to carry higher price tags. According to Johnston, fiber valuations for private deals have increased by more than 30% over the past 18 months, with most deals priced at cash-flow multiples in the high teens and low 20s.

Cable Ops Buying Already

For cable operators, fiber builds have been an integral part of their business for years. Comcast, Charter, Altice USA, Cox Communications and even midsized cable companies like Mediacom Communications have pumped huge amounts of capital to fiber their networks.

Cox made a strategic investment in Unite Private Networks (UPN), a Kansas City, Missouri-based fiber network and services provider to hospitals, schools, governments, carriers, data centers and enterprise business customers, in 2016. Cox president Pat Esser identified fiber infrastructure as an attractive long-term investment. While Cox hasn’t made a big fiber buy since — it did buy Level 3’s metro fiber assets in Albuquerque, New Mexico last year — it still considers infrastructure a good business.

“We haven’t purchased additional fiber companies since our strategic investment in UPN, but we think there is great value in infrastructure companies,” Cox spokesman Todd Smith said. “They also create additional opportunities for us to serve commercial customers.” Smith said Cox has a significant stake in another infrastructure company, InSite Wireless, and has teamed with them to deploy some distributed antenna systems for Cox Business customers.

One example: the Las Vegas Convention Center, which contains the equivalent of 14 cell towers to complement its 2,100 WiFi access points.

Altice USA also is speculated to be considering selling off its business fiber unit Lightpath, which caters mainly to large enterprise customers. Lightpath generates about $200 million in cash flow per year, according to some analysts reports, and could attract a price of about $3 billion.

Building out a fiber network is still a viable choice for many. Altice USA is expected to cross the finish line in its five-year fiber-to-the-home project for its New York metro footprint in the next few years and has already deployed the service in select areas. For smaller operators, though, cost and time to market can be prohibitive.

Altice CEO Dexter Goei said recently the FTTH rollout is underway, with 2 million homes designed, 1 million passed and 600,000 ready for service by year-end, with plans to ramp up.

According to Deloitte, building fiber can cost between $600 and $1,800 per home passed in urban and suburban areas, not including customer premises equipment.

That’s a considerable departure from the estimated $300-to-$500-per-home-passed average buildout cost for coax and hybrid fiber coaxial networks. But that may not be the biggest obstacle. Building networks takes time. And time, in the world of competitive broadband and soon-to-be-coming 5G services, is of the essence.

Arris said it is the first supplier to offer Reference Design Kit (RDK) software on its new lineup of EPON gateways, seizing on a trend that has seen cable operators complement their networks with targeted fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) deployments.

The move will put those cable operators in position to unify the software stack they are using for broadband gateways that support both their widely deployed hybrid fiber coax (HFC) networks and the small subset of FTTP networks.

RDK is a preintegrated software stack for IP-capable set-tops and gateways that is managed by a joint venture of Comcast, Liberty Global and Charter Communications. RDK has been adapted for both video set-tops (RDK-V) and broadband devices (RDK-B). More than 350 companies spanning CPE makers, silicon vendors, software developers, systems integrators and service providers are currently part of the RDK community.

Service providers that are implementing RDK software include Comcast and Cox Communications in the U.S.; Shaw Communications, Rogers Communications and Videotron in Canada; Liberty Global, NOS, The Quickline Group, Vodafone and Tele Columbus in Europe; and J:COM, Japan’s largest cable operator.

RELATED: RDK Rides the Adoption Wave

Arris said the integration of RDK into its new EPON gateways will provide MSOs with a unified backoffice system for both fiber and DOCSIS architectures while also simplifying elements such as network provisioning. Arris has also tied its own HomeAssure home WiFi management platform into those EPON devices.

Arris said it recently completed its first RDK EPON gateway deployment in the U.S. with an unnamed tier-1 operator (Comcast is one of the known MSO adopters of EPON technology) and has already pushed ahead with “high-volume” RDK deployments on multiple DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 gateways.

"Arris’s support of RDK for its global EPON gateways is a testament to the continuous innovation of Arris and also demonstrates the versatility of the RDK open-source software," Steve Heeb, president and GM of RDK Management LLC, said in a statement. "As service providers around the globe look to deploy fiber gateways, RDK provides a common method to manage core functionality, including home networking, IoT interfaces, device management, real time diagnostics, and more."

Pushing ahead on next-gen FTTP technology, Calix said it Verizon has tapped its AXOS platform to start a “large-scale” deployment of NG-PON2 in the first quarter of 2018.

The initial rollout, based on Calix’s AXOS E9-2 Intelligent Edge System, includes the AXOS RPm (Routing Protocol module for Layer 3) and the AXOS SMm (Subscriber Management module for disaggregated Broadband Network Gateway).

In 2016, Verizon selected equipment from Ericsson (in partnership with Calix) and Adtran for NG-PON2 technology testing from the telco’s Innovation Lab in Waltham, Mass. That followed earlier tests by Verizon, which determined then that NG-PON2 cold “easily provide” symmetrical speeds of 10 Gbps to businesses and residential customers.

RELATED: Verizon Sets NG-PON2 Lab Tests

“Several years ago, we determined that we were going to need a better network to meet our growing customers’ demands for bandwidth and higher throughput,” Vincent O’Byrne, director of technology planning at Verizon, said in a statement. “We saw that the single wavelength systems (e.g., 10G EPON and XGS-PON) were only possible interim solutions and that we needed a longer term solution. NG-PON2 is a platform that will meet the customers’ envisioned needs for the next decade or more given its many evolution paths as well as bringing many operational benefits to simplify the network. It represents a paradigm shift in the design of access networks.” 

Altice USA said it’s on track to reach 1 million homes constructed with fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) technology by year-end 2018 as it moves ahead on design and construction work to “several hundred thousand homes” in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

The update comes almost nine months after Altice USA announced it would skip DOCSIS 3.1 and instead focus on a FTTP upgrade that will reach the bulk of its footprint over the next five years. That initiative, called Generation Gigaspeed, aims to bring FTTP to its entire Optimum (former Cablevision Systems) footprint and to most of its Suddenlink footprint.

RELATED: Altice USA to Skip DOCSIS 3.1, Roll Out All-Fiber Network

“For us, it’s a real game-changer,” Dexter Goei, Altice USA’s chairman and CEO, said at the time, noting that the company will also apply the knowhow and the experience with FTTP in Europe to the new project and leverage the advancements made by Altice Labs, which is based in Portugal. He also said then that Altice USA is comfortable that it can complete the upgrade “without materially changing the capital outlay that we do today.”

RELATED: Altice USA in 'Unique Spot' for FTTP Upgrade 

Altice USA offered the update as Altice founder Patrick Drahi joined Goei at a fiber deployment site last Friday (August 11) on Long Island.

"We are incredibly pleased with the progress we are making on our fiber investment and look forward to lighting up this new, advanced network to enable innovative products and services to support our customers’ connectivity needs well into the future,” Goei said in a statement.

AT&T Fiber said it has launched 1-Gig service to parts of Tulsa, Okla., and surrounding areas that include Jenk and Owasso.

Tulsa adds to the 55 metro areas and 5.5 million “locations” where AT&T Fiber has been deployed. AT&T Fiber expects to expand to 75 metros.

RELATED: AT&T Expands Fiber to 17 More Metros

In Tulsa, AT&T is offering 1-Gig for $70 per month when bundled with other AT&T services, such as DirecTV or U-verse TV, on a single bill, or $80 per month as a standalone for 12 months, after which the price goes up to $90 per month.

Following a deep analysis of its next-generation network options, MCTV has opted to go with an ambitious fiber-to-the-premises deployment that will result in a GPON network that will overlay its existing hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) plant.

The initiative, branded by MCTV as “Excellerate,” will initially focus on speedy broadband services and will essentially sidestep a move to DOCSIS 3.1, the new gigabit-class technology for HFC networks. Altice USA is plowing ahead with a similar strategy in its Optimum footprint (the systems acquired from Cablevision Systems) and the bulk of the systems it acquired from Suddenlink Communications.

RELATED: Altice USA to Skip DOCSIS 3.1, Roll Out All-Fiber Network

MCTV’s plan is to overlay its entire network with a GPON-based fiber-to-the-premises network over the next two to three years. The Massillon, Ohio-based operator, which serves more than 47,000 homes and businesses, announced Monday that its Excellerate-powered network is currently available to residential customers in “select areas” in Stark and Wayne counties in the northeastern part of the state. MCTV said it will notify customers when the new offering is available in their neighborhoods.

MCTV presented its plans earlier today at a conference featuring MCTV president Robert Gessner; Jonathan McGee, president of the Ohio Cable Telecommunication Association; Matt Polka, president and CEO of the American Cable Association (ACA); and U.S. Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-OH).

MCTV estimates that the Excellerate project encompasses a $20 million investment that will factor in 1,400 miles of fiber, 79,920 miles of “glass,” 220,000 hours of manpower, 120,000 splices, 14,000 drop enclosures, and 14 communities.

“The crux of this is to build our next-generation network,” Gessner said.  

“Our plan is over next couple of years to overlay the entire system with PON…We’re betting on the ten-year plan rather than the three-to-five plan,” he added, noting that MCTV isn’t yet faced with a “pressing need” for the new PON overlay.

Though many cable operators, including Comcast, WideOpenWest, RCN and Mediacom Communications, are betting heavily on DOCSIS 3.1, MCTV’s analysis, Gessner said, showed that moving to FTTP made the most sense for the operator.

RELATED: Mediacom Launches 1-Gig Across Iowa Footprint

Gessner said MCTV, which has already been deploying a GPON FTTP in select rural greenfield scenarios, has some fairly large nodes on its HFC network, including some portions that had four to five amplifiers running between the last fiber-fed node and customer homes.

“To do DOCSIS 3.1 well, we’re going to have to run a lot of fiber,” Gessner explained. “It just seemed like that was the better option for us, given our situation.”

MCTV found that it would be no more expensive, or maybe just a little more expensive, to go with GPON and FTTP than it was to get to a node-plus-one HFC architecture.

Update: In an email, Gessner noted that the $20 million investment is the estimated cost to complete the network, including elements such as fiber construction, cabinets, splice enclosures and splicing, and does not include the cost of fiber drops and the customer premises equipment.  

Regarding which parts of the footprint are being targeted first, he added that the plan is to reach a variety of areas, including rural greenfields, suburban brownfields, city centers and overbuild scenarios. MCTV is also selecting areas based on how quickly the operator can design the area and where it wants to eliminate the bandwidth load on the HFC plant.

MCTV also has lots of fiber expertise to draw from.

In addition to its recent PON-based activity, MCTV has also been running some FTTP networks in some rural areas using RF-over-Glass an SCTE-standardized technology and platform that allows MSOs to run fiber to the premises while retaining it backoffice systems and use of DOCSIS modems for high-speed data and legacy set-top boxes for video.

“Internally, our staff is very familiar and comfortable with the idea of running and deploying fiber drops all the way to the home,” Kelly Rehm, the company’s tech ops manager, said, noting that MCTV has been actively cross-training its workforce to handle FTTP deployments.

MCTV, which is working with Adtran on the Excellerate initiative, also reasons that it will be able to keep many costs in check because it will keep the bulk of that work in-house, requiring only a small portion of the network construction to outside contractors.

Gessner said MCTV also has the benefit of deploying the new FTTP network at its own pace, as the company has already converted many employees over to handle elements such as mapping, splicing, construction and field engineering.

"It's really gratifying to see everyone accept the inventible change that is coming and to adopt new roles at the company,”  he said. “I’m really proud of our folks for putting their shoulder to the wheel and really accepting this huge project." 

And using an overlay network will also ensure that MCTV will be able to transition customers to the PON-based offering without disrupting service. “It’s an attractive reason for building a network like this,” Rehm said.

Additionally, in neighborhoods with heavy residential or business users, MSTV has the ability to transition them more rapidly to the PON network and relieve pressure on the legacy HFC plant, noted Nick Provost, MCTV’s outside plant manager.

Though MCTV’s FTTP network will be capable of delivering gigabit speeds, it will initially focus on a high-end offering that delivers symmetrical speeds of 100 Mbps while also matching its pricing for its DOCSIS-based high-speed internet services. Today, for example, MCTV sells a 100 Mbps down/5 Mbps up service for $89.95 per month when it’s purchased as a stand-alone.

MCTV will continue to deliver QAM-based video services on its HFC legacy network, even as it starts to consider a migration to IPTV much further down the road.  

“At this point, we are proceeding along a path that says the [HFC] system is working great for delivering television, so let’s keeping using it,” Gessner said.

For its limited FTTP deployments in greenfield scenarios, MCTV has been using an IPTV platform.

Google Fiber said it has begun to accept service sign ups in Huntsville, Ala., where it will offer a mix of broadband, pay TV and phone services via a municipal-owned fiber network.

Google Fiber and Huntsville Utilities announced the partnership in February 2016, and represents an agreement that does not tie into Google Fiber’s separate decision to pause expansion in some markets as it pursues less expensive wireless access alternatives.

RELATED: Google Fiber to Ride Muni-Owned Huntsville Network

In “Rocket City,” an area served by incumbent providers such as Comcast and AT&T, Google Fiber is selling 1-Gig broadband for $70 per month, a symmetrical 100 Mbps service for $50 per month, or TV bundles for $140 per month (with 100-meg), or $170 (with 1-Gig) . Google Fiber is also selling a home phone service for an additional $10 per month.

Homes and some businesses in North Huntsville are first in line for Google Fiber service. The first area tagged for service is “bounded on the west by Pulaski Pike and covers all of Huntsville north of Interstate 565 to the eastern city limits,” AL.com reports, adding that the north Huntsville section is one of six, and is one of the smaller ones, representing an area with about 14,000 residents.

Google Fiber is the city’s first tenant for its municipal fiber network, which will also allow other providers to lease access for their services, Caroline de Gantes, Google Fiber’s head of business operations in Huntsville, said in this blog post.

Sonic is expanding the reach of its FTTP network in the tech-savvy city of San Francisco and broadening its offer of an uncapped 1 Gbps broadband/phone bundle that is priced at $40 for the first 12 months.

Under the expansion, Sonic’s bundle, which rises to $50 after the first year, is being is launching in the southern portion of The Mission District, and reach into Noe Valley, The Castro, Dolores Heights, Glen Park and Potrero Hill and Sunnyside in the coming months. That will expand on earlier launches in region’s Sunset District, Richmond District and Parkside.

The expansion marks the second phase of Sonic’s project in San Francisco, company CEO Dane Jasper said, noting that the company focused on areas where it has seen the most interest for the FTTP-fueled offering.

RELATED: Sonic.net Preps $40 1-Gig/Voice Bundle

“It’s a pretty aggressive and exciting product,” he said.

Sonic isn’t disclosing sub numbers or penetration rates for San Francisco, but Jasper said “demand is strong” there. Overall, the company has seen 25% growth overall (and has seen its base of installers grow by more than 300% over the past year), driven primarily by Sonic’s fiber product.

RELATED: Sonic.net CEO: Tiered Pricing 'Doesn't Make Sense'

Sonic will start to activate service in parts of the new build-out phase this week. Customers can also pre-order service in areas where construction isn’t complete. Jasper expects to complete the next phase of the build-out, which uses GPON technology, by March 2018.

“It’s a rolling deployment,” he said, holding that San Francisco has long been one of the nation’s “poorly connected large cities” amid deployment challenges and incumbent MSOs that don’t feel enough competitive pressure.

For its part, Comcast does offer its relatively pricey 2 Gbps “Gigabit Pro” FTTP service on a targeted basis in the San Francisco market, but has not announced when it will offer 1 Gbps using DOCSIS 3.1 there.

On the regulatory side, Jasper disagrees with those that believe that the regulatory framework of the 1996 Telecom Act haven’t’ worked with respect to deployment, at least in Sonic’s case.

“Sonic  is the embodiment of the vision of the 1996 Act,” he said, noting that his company started as an ISP, became a CLEC and deployed into central offices, and is now building its own outside plant.

“That investment ladder, that movement up the food chain, from resale to inside plant facilities to outside plant facilities, is exactly the kind of innovation and deployment that, in my opinion, the 1996 Act enabled,” Jasper said, noting that the example runs counter to comments related to the current Open Internet proceeding.

RELATED: FCC's Pai Launches Effort to Repeal Title II

“As we accumulate enough customers in an area, like the Mission District in San Francisco, we overbuild with fiber,” he said.

Sonic is also considering this in other cities in California, though it’s not announcing where it intends to build next.

“This is not one and done,” Jasper said of the San Francisco buildout expansion. “This is an ongoing process.”

Verizon Communications is flirting with 1-Gig consumer broadband service with the debut of Fios Gigabit Connection, a new optimized offering that delivers up to 940 Mbps down and 880 Mbps up starting at $69.99 a month.

The debut of the near-1-Gig offering from Fios follows the mid-January introduction of Fios Instant Internet, a symmetrical 750 Mbps service that was initially available to about 7 million homes and businesses.

RELATED: Verizon Fios Launching Symmetrical 750-Meg Broadband

Verizon noted that the network performance of Instant Internet exceeded 750 Mbps, and has since “fine-tuned the service with new firmware and diagnostic tools” to ratchet up speeds further. . Existing customers on Fios Instant Internet service will automatically receive Fios Gigabit Connection and also see their bills lowered (Verizon initially sold that 750 Meg offering for $149.99 a month as a standalone, and $169.99 a month as part of a triple-play bundle).

The new offering starts at $69.99 a month as a standalone, or as part of a triple-play bundle that starts at $79.99 a month, when ordered online.

Verizon said Fios Gigabit Connection is available to more than 8 million homes in parts of the New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Richmond, Va., Hampton Roads, Va., Boston, Providence and Washington, D.C. areas.

Verizon is launching the faster tier as it sees competitors such as Comcast and RCN deploy DOCSIS 3.1-based services that deliver up to 1 Gbps in the downstream, but paired with much slower upstream speeds. The cable industry is pursuing a Full Duplex annex to D3.1 that will enable symmetrical multi-gigabit speeds.

 Verizon added 35,000 Fios Internet subs in Q1 2017, extending that total to 5.68 million. 

Offering a way for cable operators to migrate to a more efficient, virtualized platform, Calix has introduced a product that can plug into their legacy access networks and utilize software-defined capabilities.

Calix said that product, the AXOS DPx Connector, is a DOCSIS Virtualized Network Function (VNF) that can be woven into existing OSS (operational support systems) for HFC and PON networks deployed by MSOs.

Cable operators are eager to shift to software-defined networking and virtualized apps and systems, but they are challenged with how to develop a framework that can fit that into those legacy OSS environments, Shane Eleniak, vice president of product line leadership at Calix, said.

Calix has already done some work with DOCSIS Provisioning of EPON and DOCSIS Provisioning of GPON, which enable operators to utilize their DOCSIS backoffice systems for PON deployments, but want to move away from a classic, monolithic software approach, he said.

MSOs, Eleniak added, “want to invest in something that is SDN-aware…The tricky part for an operator, is how do I bridge?”

Calix claims that the AXOS DPx Connector can be plugged into the existing architecture and virtualize the applications without altering the underlying backoffice systems. MSOs would also use the same servers, but the new connector would add scale and tie it back to a data center or network operation center (NOC).

To aid the effort, Calix has teamed up with Momentum Telecom, a company that supplies DOCSIS management/provisioning products and hosted voice services to cable operators.

Eleniak said the primary, early targets for the new product are cable operators that have been deploying PON or have it on their roadmap for certain scenarios in a way that complements the HFC side of their business. He said it will also fit in as operators deploy DOCSIS 3.1 and starting to pursue “virtual” Converged Cable Access Platforms (CCAPs) and distributed access architectures.

Calix said it has field trials underway. It will be using a two-pronged approach for trials and deployments – working with Momentum and its base of MSOs as well as direct engagements with the operators, according to Doug Blue, Calix's solutions marketing director for cable. 

 “As an industry, we know that SDN is the way of the future of service providers and this partnership between Calix and Momentum Telecom will allow our customers to more easily move to an SDN architecture as soon as they are ready,” Scott Helms, senior vice president of advanced services at Momentum Telecom, said in a statement. “The service agility enabled by SDN has become a key strategic goal for cable operators, and the combined solution allows our joint customers to immediately begin to reap the benefits of an SDA architecture without the complexity of high costs of integration.“  

DENVER – To help it keep pace with capacity demands, Comcast is eyeing an upstream path-widening “mid-split” that ties into a plan to pull fiber closer to the home to the point that the operator is using a “passive” HFC plant that reduces the number of powered amplifiers between the node and the home to zero.

Comcast is on that mid-split path, which would raise the expand the amount of spectrum dedicated to the upstream from today’s 5 MHz to 42 MHz range to 85 MHz, according to Robert Howald, VP of network architecture at Comcast, during a keynote discussion here Tuesday at Light Reading’s Next-Gen Technologies & Strategies conference.

Some operators are taking a look at a “high-split” that would raise the upstream spectrum ceiling to about 200 MHz, but Comcast’s sticking with a mid-split “for now,” he said, noting that the effort is happening as the MSO pushes ahead with its new “fiber deep” architecture, which is also referred to as “N+O” to describe the number of electrified amps (zero) between the home and the node.

“Fiber deep is a methodical way to do a bunch of node splits all at once,” Howald said in a separate panel discussion, noting that it gives an operator the ability to use spectrum for flexibly, support smaller service group sizes, alongside improved maintenance because the coax portion of the plant becomes passive.

Comcast hasn’t announced a deployment timeframe for fiber deep, but “we’re trying to get there quickly,” he said.

Comcast and other MSOs are also taking a close look at Full Duplex DOCSIS, a longer-term annex to DOCSIS 3.1 that will allow upstream and downstream traffic to run in the same block of spectrum and enable symmetrical multi-gigabit speeds on HFC networks. The hardware specs for Full Duplex, expected to work in tandem with N+0 and more distributed access architectures that push more of the electronics from the hub to the node, are expected to be published by mid-year.

“I think we’re in pretty good shape with what we’re doing with the network,” Howald said, pointing to the capabilities of DOCSIS 3.1 and Full Duplex DOCSIS (FDX), when asked why Comcast doesn’t just skip over N+0 and go with FTTP. “I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s inevitable,” he said of FTTP.

Full Duplex Update

FDX is just one “neat and novel” tool at cable’s disposal as they eye ways to handle upstream demand, alongside nodes splits and changing how MSOs are splitting the upstream and downstream paths on the spectrum, Jeff Finkelstein, executive director of advanced access architectures at Cox Communications, said during a separate panel discussion.

FDX is “like having your cake and eating it too,” because it allows cable operators to add upstream capacity without taking away from the downstream,” Steve Krapp, technical marketing director at MaxLinear, said.

FDX is a “tool that will give us more flexible to make the upstream than it is today,” Howald said. “At its core, [FDX] is a DOCSIS 3.1 technology. It’s not like we’re inventing something new …we’re adding new tools to make it more capable.”

While average bandwidth demands aren’t rising immensely, the max needs for the upstream are rising 20% to 30%, and the downstream needs are increasing 40% to 50% on a CAGR basis, Tom Cloonan, CTO for system architecture at Arris, said.

Based on current projections, Cloonan sees the era of symmetrical broadband services starting in 2019. “I think [Full Duplex DOCSIS] will come out just in time when customers need gigabit upstreams,” he said.

Finkelstein said DOCSIS 3.1, paired with a high-split, could enable 1-Gig symmetrical services at low penetrations, and referred to the current upstream weakness of DOCSIS 3.1 as the “iceberg” of the platform. But he also said that a D3.1 enhancer like FDX will put MSOs in position to deliver symmetrical gigabit speeds at higher penetrations.

During a keynote earlier in the day, Finkelstein also termed fiber buildout as one of Cox’s “non-regrettable” spends, alongside its early decision to build capacity to 1 GHz and the MSO’s early adoption of bandwidth-saving techniques like switched digital video.

“Rule number one: You can never have too much fiber,” he said. “You never regret having fiber.” But he also stressed that “coax has a long life” as MSOs transition along the path of DOCSIS 3.1, FDX and going with fiber deep architectures.

5G as a multi-gig access technology

Discussions and debates during the day also centered on 5G and its potential as an access technology that can deliver gigabit speeds to the home.

RELATED: Verizon Gets a Fix on 5G Trials

During a keynote discussion, Balan Nair, executive VP and chief technology officer at Liberty Global, didn’t mince words when asked if 5G was a good replacement for access. “Terribly false…Bullshit,” he said.

RELATED: Fiber In The Sky (subscription required)

Earlier, Howald played up the backhaul opportunity that 5G presents to MSOs. “Good wireless needs good wires,” he said, reiterating a recent study showing that Comcast’s broadband infrastructure fits 5G wireless networks like a glove.

RELATED: Smit: Comcast’s Fiber Network Plans Have 'Uncanny' Compatibility with 5G

Howald also noted that 5G signals, when delivered in the high frequency bands, don’t propagate well in the presence of trees and buildings. “They hardly like air,” he joked.

5G’s limitations in the millimeter bands is why service providers will need to consider a “dual-PHY” approach that can fall back to sub-6GHz spectrum that doesn’t require line-of-sight, Charles Cheevers, chief technology officer for consumer premises equipment at Arris, said in a panel on cable’s pursuit of wireless and  mobile tech and services.

The downside with dual-PHY is that it will make 5G CPE more costly, Cheevers said. 

Google Fiber and the Access unit of parent company Alphabet has a new CEO, who is coming on board amid the move to a more decentralized structure that will affect hundreds of employees while enabling the division to remain committed to its current batch of cities and push into a small group of new ones.  

On the leadership front, Alphabet has tapped Gregory McCray as CEO of its Access division, which includes operations of Google Fiber, which is building out FTTP networks that support gigabit broadband, voice and TV services.

McCray, who has been serving as CEO of Aero Communications and on the board of CenturyLink, takes over in the role previously held by Craig Barratt, who has since resigned that post and was recently named CEO of Barefoot Networks, a maker of fast, programmable Ethernet switch chips that counts Google among its financial backers. Late last year, The Information reported that CenturyLink was a “potential acquirer” of Google Fiber.

RELATED: Building Fiber Networks: Difficult and Lame?

“Google Fiber has been instrumental making the web faster and better for everyone — something I’ve been passionate about my entire career,” McCray said, in a statement. “I’m thrilled to lead Access as we continue in our mission to connect more people to abundant access, on networks that are always fast and always open.”

McCray heads up Access following a recent decision to pause Google Fiber’s expansion plans as it concentrated on current deployments and explored less expensive wireless broadband alternatives.  

 RELATED: Google Fiber Pauses Expansion Plans, Laying Off Some Staff

“Google Fiber remains focused on our customers and cities. We want to bring Google Fiber to customers faster, so we’re focused on making deployment more efficient and less intrusive,” a Google Fiber spokesperson said. “We’re thrilled that Greg has agreed to join as CEO, to drive this innovation and to grow the business.”

The Google Fiber team is moving to a more decentralized structure that will allow for more innovation to come from the field, but a move that will also result in hundreds of employees shifting into new roles in Google and Alphabet, a person familiar with the matter said, confirming a story first reported by Bloomberg.

The new structure, the person added, will likewise mean that Access will look a bit more like a startup again, with a focus on innovations designed to improve business results and service velocity.

Google Fiber, the person added, will also look to serve existing subscribers and add new ones in the current cities, and is now in position to push ahead with previous plans to enter new cities such as Huntsville, Ala.; Louisville, Ky., and San Antonio, Texas.

RELATED: Google Fiber to Ride Muni-Owned Huntsville Network

Cities still on Google Fiber’s list for “potential” build outs include Dallas, Texas; Jacksonville, Fla.; Los Angeles, Calif.; Oklahoma City, Okla.; Phoenix, Ariz.; San Jose, Calif., Tampa, Fla.; and Portland, Ore.  

Cities supported by Webpass, the wireless broadband company acquired last fall by Google Fiber, include Boston; Chicago; Miami, San Diego, San Francisco, and Oakland.

AT&T Fiber said its FTTP network and 1 Gbps broadband service will reach 51 major metros by the end of the month following launches in a handful of additional markets.

That latest batch of launches includes parts of Columbia, S.C.; Jackson, Miss.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Milwaukee, Wis.; and Shreveport, La.

AT&T Fiber, recently rebranded from AT&T GigaPower, said it now offers 1-Gig connections to nearly 4 million customer locations, of which about 650,000 are apartments and condo units.

Speaking on AT&T’s recent earnings call, company CFO John Stephens said AT&T is “ahead of plan” with the company’s FTTP buildout, citing the 4 million current locations, with 12.5 million locations still being targeted by the buildout.

He said broadband penetration is 9% higher in FTTP markets versus AT&T’s non-fiber footprint, and that about half of new broadband subs in fiber markets take speeds of 100 Mbps or more, and 30% are taking 1 Gig.

Antietam Cable Television said it has launched Phase 2 of its 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home/business network by expanding it to the entire town of Boonsboro, Md.

That network, branded as Flight Gigabit, will pass an additional 5,000 homes and businesses in Boonsboro and additional areas of Washington County to be announced when it’s completed by this fall, the company said.

With Phase 2, Antietam Cable is adding $3 million of private equity, expanding its total investment to $6 million for Flight Internet, and a plan to extend access to more than 11,000 homes and businesses in 2017. Last year, the operator launched Phase 1 of Flight Gigabit to 6,000 homes and residences in Hagerstown. Antietam Cable has been asked about pricing on the operator's symmetrical 1-Gig product.

Update: Promotional pricing on the residential is $99 per month for the first year, and $199 per month for businesses for the first two years, a company official said. 

“We’re pleased to expand Flight Gigabit to all of Boonsboro and additional areas of Washington County. This is the right investment at the right time and will have a positive impact in the communities we serve,” Brian Lynch, president Antietam Cable, said in a statement. “Phase 2 is a continuation of Antietam’s commitment to enhance the lives of our customers with state of the art technology and the best customer experience."

DirecTV Now is being punished in social media circles and in recent product reviews for technical snafus that have stymied the OTT-TV service in its early days, but AT&T seems pleased with the results it's seeing so far. 

DirecTV is “off to a really fast start,” Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman and CEO, said on the company’s Q4 call Wednesday, later pointing out that U-verse TV, launched in 2007, took about 18 months to get to 200,000 subs.

Though AT&T’s traditional pay TV base lost 27,000 subs in Q4, the 200,000-plus paid DirecTV subs generated in its first month allowed AT&T’s total video sub base to finish the quarter in the black.

RELATED: AT&T Sheds 262K U-verse TV Subs, Adds 235K Satellite TV Subs in Q4

“We’re pleased with the initial results from DirecTV Now, but we’re going to be careful with our expectations,” John Stephens, AT&T’s CFO, said earlier in the call, noting that special promotions and launch pricing helped drive subs to the new service.

No one asked AT&T how it’s dealing with some of the streaming issues that have been plaguing DirecTV Now,  but Stephens volunteered that the company is we're "working through the expected challenges that come with launching a new, innovative service of this magnitude." 

Regarding some early learnings, he said DirecTV Now subs are skewing urban, younger and tend to draw more apartment dwellers than a typical linear customer, and that the sales process is simply different because consumers only need broadband, a supported device and a credit card to get going.

The new regulatory environment also came up on the call, as AT&T was asked to weigh in on the appointment of new FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

That led to a discussion about zero-rating, a controversial policy in which certain data is exempt from data usage plans. The FCC, then under Tom Wheeler, indicated concerns that the combo of DirecTV now and AT&T sponsored data plans "appears to present significant anti-competitive effects."

RELATED: FCC Takes Aim at DirecTV Now

AT&T defended it then, and Stephenson did so again today, reiterating the stance that AT&T believes that the FCC’s criticism “was without basis, without any legal basis” and that “you should expect to see us go hard” with zero-rated services and policies. We’re having some really good success in the marketplace with this."

Stephens said AT&T is also “ahead of plan” with the company’s FTTP buildout, which is available today to about 4 million consumer customer locations, with 12.5 million locations still being targeted by the buildout.

He said broadband penetration is 9% higher in FTTP markets versus AT&T’s non-fiber footprint, and that about half of new broadband subs in fiber markets take speeds of 100 Mbps or more, and 30% are taking 1 Gig.

“As our fiber deployment accelerates,  we're excited about this growth opportunity,” he said. 

Verizon’s new symmetrical 750 Mbps broadband tier, called Fios Instant Internet, has been launched to parts of Boston and Norfolk, Va.

Introduced earlier this month, the new offering, which replaces a 500-Meg service as telco’s high-end tier, has also debuted in New York City/Northern New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Richmond.

RELATED: Verizon Fios Launching Symmetrical 750-Meg Broadband

Verizon is selling the 750-meg service  $149.99 a month as a standalone, and as part of a triple-play bundle that starts at $169.99 per month.

Verizon, which launched Fios service in Boston, where it competes with Comcast and RCN Corp., in December 2016. Verizon ended 2016 with 5.7 million Fios Internet connections and 4.7 million Fios video connections.

RELATED: Verizon Boots Up Fios Service in Boston

Though 1-Gig represents the speed bar for an increasing number of ISPs, Verizon's next step up the broadband speed ladder will be 750 Mbps as the telco introduces a new symmetrical tier, called Fios Instant Internet, to about 7 million homes and businesses starting Saturday (Jan. 14).

Verizon Fios, which has been offering a high-end offering that tops out at 500 Mbps up and down, said it will initially debut the new 750-meg tier in New York City/Northern New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Richmond, with more markets to follow later in the year. Fios Instant Internet will be launched in Boston and Norfolk later in Q1, the telco said.

RELATED: Verizon Boots Up Fios Service in Boston

Per the announcement, Verizon will sell the new tier for $149.99 a month as a standalone, and $169.99 a month as part of a triple-play bundle with TV and home phone service. Notably, the standalone pricing undercuts Verizon’s current pricing on a 300 Mbps service ($170) and the telco’s 500-Meg offering (about $270), Ars Technica notes, though Verizon told the publication that it plans to adjust pricing on those tiers.

Verizon has so far avoided taking the plunge on a 1-Gig service that pairs up with the kind of speeds being advertised by providers such as Google Fiber, or from cable competitors, such as Comcast and RCN, that have begun to roll out DOCSIS 3.1-based services that deliver burst up to 1-Gig in the downstream direction (a “Full Duplex” extension of D3.1 that's in the works is targeting symmetrical multi-gig speeds). Altice USA, which tangles with Fios in the former Cablevision Systems markets, recently launched a 300 Mbps DOCSIS-based tier in its Optimum footprint, and is pushing ahead with an ambitious FTTP upgrade plan.

RELATED: Comcast Sets DOCSIS 3.1 Expansion, Launches 1-Gig in Detroit

A Verizon spokesperson noted that the new 750-meg Fios Instant Internet service “frequently performs well into the 900 Mbps range.”

Verizon has not announced when it might deploy a 1-Gig service for Fios, but the company is certainly thinking about a faster future for its fiber networks. On Wednesday, the company announced a successful interop lab trial for NG-PON2, an emerging FTTP technology that supports multi-gigabit speeds.

RELATED: Verizon Touts Progress on Next-Gen FTTP

“No Internet service provider has come close to offering upload and download speeds like these at such a massive scale as Fios Instant Internet," Ken Dixon, president of Verizon's consumer landline business, said in a statement. "Ever since we decided to build the nation's largest 100 percent fiber-to-the-home network 14 years ago, we've been saying that it is a future-proof technology. The future is now here with Fios Instant Internet."

AT&T Fiber said it has introduced 1-Gig broadband service to parts of three more markets – Greenville, S.C.; Little Rock, Ark.; and Sacramento,  Calif.

There, AT&T Fiber’s standalone 1-Gig service starts at $90 per month.

RELATED: Good-Bye, GigaPower...Hello ‘AT&T Fiber’

With those additions, AT&T Fiber said it has launched service to parts of 46 metros nationwide and 3 million “locations,” including more than 500,000 apartments and condo units. AT&T Fiber said the latest deployments fulfills its commitment to bring service to at least 45 major metros by the end of 2016.

AT&T Fiber plans to expand to at least 67 metros.

RELATED: AT&T to Tweak, Raise Broadband Data Plans

Tied into a rebrand of its fiber-based offering, AT&Trecentlysunset Internet Preferences, a targeted Web advertising program it has been using in tandem with its lower-cost 1-Gig broadband service tiers. 

DOCSIS 3.1 won’t be central to the future strategies of all cable operators, but the next-gen, multi-gigabit platform remains the best way to deliver big speeds across the MSO’s footprint, Mike Cavanagh, Comcast’s SVP and CFO, maintained Wednesday at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference.

“From where we sit, we’re rolling out DOCSIS 3.1,” Cavanagh said. “We think that's the most effective and efficient way to give big speeds across the footprint most quickly, most economically.”

Mediacom Communications would seemingly agree, as it will have D3.1 rolled out across its network by year end. An outlier is Altice USA, which is pivoting away from HFC as it gears up for an ambitious plan to deploy a fiber-to-the-premises architecture across most of its footprint over the next six years.

RELATED: Altice USA to Skip DOCSIS 3.1, Roll Out All-Fiber Network

Comcast is expanding its deployment of DOCSIS 3.1 for a new tier of service that delivers up to 1 Gbps in the downstream.

RELATED: Comcast Sets DOCSIS 3.1 Expansion, Launches 1-Gig in Detroit

“In a couple of years' time, we'll have the next-generation DOCSIS, which will allow for a multi-gig symmetrical. So that's our roadmap,” Cavanagh said in an apparent reference to Full Duplex, an extension to the D3.1 spec that will enable MSOs to deliver symmetrical speeds up to 10 Gbps. At the same conference, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said his company would also be pursuing Full Duplex and symmetrical speeds up to 10-Gig. 

RELATED: ‘Full Duplex’ DOCSIS Speeds Ahead

He also acknowledged that Comcast always has the option to deploy fiber-to-the-premises “anywhere it makes sense,” such as MDUs,  “hyper-builds” for business services, and in greenfield situations. Comcast already offers a fiber-based 2 Gbps residential broadband service called Gigabit Pro across a sizable portion of its footprint.

“But it's…area-by-area, situation-by-situation. We got a pretty full toolkit and we think we deployed capital in a smart way against an opportunity that we're very optimistic about,” Cavanagh said.

As for 5G, an emerging technology that AT&T and Verizon intend to use to deliver gigabit-class speeds to the home, Comcast sees “plenty of opportunity in it,” particularly for backhaul.

He said the degree of the threat of 5G to Comcast is unclear, but allowed that “there may well be use cases that are interesting that impinge on some of what we do.”

Cavanagh also reiterated a belief that Comcast still has room to grow on the broadband side, noting that there are about 6 million DSL homes in its footprint to go after.

As for Comcast’s triggered MVNO agreement, he said the company feels comfortable that it will be able to use it to assemble a compelling offering, expected to debut by mid-2017.

RELATED: Roberts: Comcast Can Make Money on Wireless

“[We] know that the proof is in the pudding and we've got work to do to bring it to market and overcome some of the skepticisms of whether MVNOs can work, but we're optimistic that it can work for us against the goals that we have for that,”  Cavanagh said.

As for recent skepticisms about the model,  T-Mobile CFO Braxton Carter said at the same conference that MVNO deals don’t provide deep integration that providers require.

“Having that ecosystem is extremely important,” he said Monday, according to Fierce Cable. “But there's a reason where it's even more important: You're never going to get deep integration in the network with an MVNO. The only way you're going to get deep integration is by owning and controlling what you're doing. And that's absolutely critical.”

Cavanagh said that the proposed AT&T-Time Warner merger has no effect on Comcast’s mobile/wireless plans, noting that the MSO already has 150 people working on the project, being led by Greg Butz.

Verizon said it has begun to offer a triple-play of broadband, TV and voice services powered by its fiber-fueled Fios platform in Boston about eight months after it announced the $300 million, six-year network investment plan.

RELATED: Verizon Fios Coming to Boston

Early on, Fios service are available in parts of Dorchester, Roslindale and West Roxbury. Verizon hasset up a web sitethat lets area residents find out when service will be offered in their individual neighborhoods as the telco moves on its “street-by-street, week-by-week” rollouts there.

Verizon, which competes in  Boston with Comcast and RCN, also plans to deploy Fios Roxbury's Dudley Square Innovation District before year's end. By then, more than 25,000 addresses in Boston will be able to order Fios.

Similar in some ways to Google Fiber’s “rally” process, Verizon and the city have been asking consumers to “vote” in order to bump them up higher on the priority list as the Fios expands across the city. For the buildout, Verizon has divided the city into four groups – A, B, C and D – with each group sub-divided into smaller Fiber Zones. 

Verizon has placed more than 160 miles of fiber throughout Boston since the April announcement, the company said.

The company’s triple play bundle, with symmetrical 150 Mbps broadband service, Custom TV service, and voice, starts at $79.99 per month for the first year.

Verizon said it will also donate $100,000 to the Boston Public Library in support of a new Wi-Fi Hotspot Lending program, a two-year pilot effort that will focus on making 100 hotspots available to library patrons. 

Altice USA hasn’t outlined the economic model for its ambitious fiber-to-the-premises upgrade, but the operator is pretty well positioned to pull it off, particularly in the highly concentrated former Cablevision Systems properties serving parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, according to an industry analyst who keeps close tabs on the fixed broadband sector. 

RELATED: Altice USA to Skip DOCSIS 3.1, Roll Out All-Fiber Network

Altice USA is in “unique spot” in that it is already relatively fiber-rich in the Optimum (former Cablevision) footprint, Jeff Heynen senior research analyst for SNL Kagan, said.

For starters, those systems already average 300 or fewer homes per node, he said. Additionally, its Lightpath division, which serves large business customers, has “tremendous” rights of way access, interconnection fiber points, and a bunch of buildings already connected to fiber.

Heynen also agreed that Altice USA’s preponderance of aerial plant in those areas will help because it means the operator won’t need to do a lot of expensive and disruptive trenching.

Those combination of factors, he said, will help to reduce Altice USA’s exposure to the biggest expenses it will face with the FTTP upgrade – labor and right-of-way access.

The Suddenlink footprint is more rural and, therefore, much different, but tends to serve areas where there’s more housing growth, presenting the operator with greenfields that are more optimal for FTTP deployments.

Given the difference in geographies also partly spells out why Altice USA has committed to upgrade to FTTP in the full Optimum footprint and most – but not all – of the Suddenlink footprint over the next five years.

Though most MSOs won’t go for a full-scale upgrade like Altice USA is pursuing, Heynen does expect some tier 2/3 cable ops move forward on similar strategies amid competitive pressures and because they could make better financial sense in these smaller doses.

“I still think he majority of operators will follow that DOCSIS path for as long as they can,” he said. “But it shouldn’t be surprising if other operators, including larger ones, commit to a larger fiber footprint buildout than what they’re currently doing.”

RELATED: Comcast Broadens ‘Gigabit Pro’ Rollout

Altice USA’s plan isn’t great news for DOCSIS vendors, but many of those suppliers, like Arris, have already added PON and other FTTP technologies to their arsenals, or have added cable tech products and expertise to their FTTP lineup.

RELATED: Adtran Tightens Ties to Cable’s Access Network

“If you’re a vendor and weren’t hedging bets on DOCSIS having a finite lifespan, then that is the wrong bet,” Heynen said. “At this point, with how operators are thinking about their access networks, all technologies are on the table.”

He said traditional DOCSIS tech players will also be aided by specs that allow the provisioning of DOCSIS to run on PON networks.

RELATED: CableLabs Developing GPON-Focused Specs

“It’s a little easier than starting from scratch,” he said.

Altice USA is placing a bet on fiber that’s so large that it will become grossly inaccurate to refer to the company as a “cable” provider in the years to come.

Altice USA, the service provider comprised of Altice N.V.’s acquisitions of Cablevision Systems and Suddenlink Communications, has embarked on an ambitious investment initiative that will skip DOCSIS 3.1 and instead focus on a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) upgrade that will encompass the bulk of its footprint over the next five years.

RELATED: As Altice Closes on Cablevision, Goei Says Company Will Take Its Time

The five-year deployment schedule, referred to by Altice USA as “Generation Gigaspeed,” is slated to start in 2017 and bring FTTP to its entire Optimum (former Cablevision) footprint and to most of its Suddenlink footprint. The company plans to announce its initial rollout markets in the coming months.

It’s a big and bold move, as the combined footprint of Optimum and Suddenlink pass about 8.3 million fiber/cable homes. Altice USA’s plan also bucks the industry trend.

Though some U.S. cable operators are deploying FTTP in greenfields and in a relatively targeted fashion, few are looking to pivot away from hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) completely and go with an all-fiber upgrade, at least at the scale and scope that Altice USA is proposing.

Because across-the-board FTTP upgrades are generally considered by the vast majority of MSOs as too expensive to deploy for the payback given, most cable operators are instead looking to drive toward gigabit-class speeds on their widely deployed HFC networks through a more iterative process – by splitting nodes, deploying fiber closer (but not all the way) to the home, and rolling out DOCSIS 3.1, a CableLabs-specified platform that delivers multi-gigabit capabilities to HFC. Last August, Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries estimated that the MSO would be able to deploy DOCSIS 3.1 and deliver 1-gig speeds for about €20 (US $21.23) per home, a cost that excludes the consumer premises equipment/modem.

RELATED: Comcast Sets DOCSIS 3.1 Expansion, Launches 1-Gig in Detroit

Citing the FTTP playbook Altice N.V. is already using in France (22 million fiber  homes by the end of 2022) and Portugal (5.3 million fiber homes passed by the end of 2020) and its access to “proprietary” technologies developed by Altice Labs, the company’s U.S. division is confident that its FTTP rollout plan is sound from a technology and economic perspective.

Going with a DOCSIS 3.1 game plan “felt to us as one step forward but not a step forward enough relative to what we see as the future of continued connectivity and higher bandwidth usage,” Dexter Goei, Altice USA’s chairman and CEO, said in an interview, noting that the operator has reached an “inflection point” as it sees a disproportionate number of gross broadband subscriber additions taking higher and higher Internet speed tiers.  

“We’re big believers in this trend continuing, and we really are moving toward a 10-gig world,” Goei said. “And to sit around and do this in multiple steps doesn’t make any sense [so we decided] to skip over DOCSIS 3.1 and get straight to the point.”

The Economic Angle

Altice USA did not outline the specific economics that will underpin Generation Gigaspeed, but Goei said the company is comfortable that it can execute on it effectively from both a labor and equipment standpoint “without materially changing the capital outlay that we do today.”

“For us, it’s a real game-changer,” Goei said, noting that Altice USA will also apply the knowhow and the experience with FTTP in Europe to the new project and leverage the advancements made by Altice Labs, which is based in Portugal.

RELATED: Altice Group Launches R&D Lab in Portugal

Altice, Goei added, has also been able to implement price points with equipment suppliers that generate material capital budget savings, and has also been able to generate savings by dropping projects that the company didn’t find useful for its Suddenlink and Optimum properties.

RELATED: Altice Halts Freewheel Sales

"All of that money is getting plowed back into this fiber project,”  Goei said. “We think we're being very efficient about using our savings and redeploying it into foolproofing our network for the long term.”

He said Altice USA’s plan rides on some critical economic tailwinds because it will be extending its HFC network, which already has fiber built to the node, rather than having to build an end-to-end network such as Verizon did with FiOS and Google Fiber has been struggling to pull off.

RELATED: Google Fiber Pauses Expansion Plans, Laying Off Some Staff

Update: Jeff Heynen, analyst with SNL Kagan, weighed in on Altice's plan on Twitter Wednesday, noting that the operator will benefit from the concentrated nature of the Optimum footprint, while also believing that other MSOs might follow suit: 

Altice won't be the only one. Easier to do FTTP in Cablevision footprint. https://t.co/hp8jEDigiI

— Jeff Heynen (@jeffheynen) November 30, 2016

Goei, who believes Altice USA’s preponderance of aerial plant will also help with the speed and cost of deploying FTTP, also expressed confidence that the newly proposed all-glass architecture will provide an economic boost in other ways, hopeful that the resulting network will require less maintenance and truck rolls and deliver services that improve customer satisfaction.

One major challenge Altice USA will seemingly face is how to deploy its FTTP network without causing service disruptions. “We’re very focused on making sure that the client transition is seamless,” Goei said.

Ahead of its coming FTTP upgrade, Altice has been leaning on DOCSIS-based technologies to deliver faster speeds on HFC. Suddenlink’s legacy, 1-Gig focused Project Gigaspeed rollout has reached nearly half of Suddenlink’s service area. More recently, Altice USA launched a 300 Mbps residential broadband service in its Optimum new York metro area footprint, where the MSO tangles with Verizon FiOS.

RELATED: Suddenlink Expands 1-Gig Reach

Altice USA Eyes ‘Full-IP’ Video Future

The FTTP rollout might also have an impact on Altice USA’s video service. RF-over-Glass (RFoG), now an SCTE standard, enables MSOs to deliver legacy QAM-based video services over FTTP networks, but it’s not clear if Altice intends to use it.

RELATED: Arris Touts Progress On DOCSIS 3.1, RFoG

Goei wouldn’t outline Altice USA’s video service roadmap, but allowed that the operator will likely move to a hybrid approach. “Fundamentally the idea is to go full-IP,” he said.

In France, Altice has already introduced a next-gen set-top/gateway initially targeted for FTTP networks that supports 4K, bakes in eight tuners and is outfitted with a new UI, a 500 GB hard drive and integrated NFC, Bluetooth and 802.11ac WiFi,  but has not announced if it would extend that part of its video game plan to the U.S.

It’s also unknown if Altice’s reported investment in Layer3 TV, the Denver-based next-gen cable operator that runs video on IP, will factor into the MSO’s future video plans.

RELATED: Layer3 TV: A Different Kind of Animal

AT&T said it is expanding the availability of fiber-fed 1 Gbps service to portions of at least ten additional major metro areas this month.

AT&T, which recently dropped the “GigaPower” moniker in favor of a new umbrella brand, AT&T Fiber, said it has launched 1-Gig this month in Columbus, Ohio; Detroit, Mich.; and  Huntsville, Ala.; and will add the following markets later this month: Augusta, Ga.; Bakersfield, Calif.; Ft. Smith/Northwest Arkansas, Ark.; Louisville, Ky.; Lubbock, Texas; Memphis, Tenn.; and Mobile, Ala.

RELATED: Good-Bye, GigaPower...Hello ‘AT&T Fiber’

The company said it has introduced 1-Gig in parts of 32 major metro areas, and is on track to reach at least 45 metros by the end of 2016, and 67 overall.

AT&T claims to be marketing gigabit broadband to more 3 million “locations,” a number that it plans to expand to 12.5 million by mid-2019.

RELATED: AT&T to Tweak, Raise Broadband Data Plans

AT&T recently confirmed that it is sunsetting Internet Preferences, a targeted Web advertising program it has been using in tandem with a lower-cost 1-Gig broadband service tier. 

CenturyLink and Lumiere Fiber are partnering to bring 1-Gig services to Sterling Ranch, a master-planned community in Colorado being built in the northwest Douglas County area.

CenturyLink, which competes in the market with Comcast, has signed on as the exclusive broadband provider for Sterling Ranch, a 3,400-acre community that will be built out over about 20 years with an estimated 12,000 residenances. CenturyLink said it marks the first time it will bring gigabit service to an entire community in Colorado.

Sterling Ranch is a 3,400-acre, master-planned community that will continue to be built out over approximately 20 years with an estimated 12,000 residences. 

The 1-Gig offering will be offered at a “special rate” of $85 per month, include a wireless access point, with the option to get CenturyLink’s IP-based Prism TV service.

The partnership was announced Monday at a recently opened CenturyLink Solutions Store in Denver. Colorado Senate Majority Leader Mark Scheffel and State Representative Kim Ransom joined CenturyLink and Sterling Ranch execs for the announcement. 

Australian government-backed National Broadband Network (nbn) said it remains “on track” to complete its stated plan to complete its network build by 2020 and connect 8 million premises, but it will be reducing the amount of hybrid fiber/coax (HFC) required to reach that goal.

In a revised corporate plan released this week, nbn outlined a shift in mix of technology types it will use to connect 8 million premises by 2020. 

It originally planned to reach that in part with HFC to 4 million premises that are considered “ready for service” (RFS), but knocked that forecast down to 2.5 million to 3.2 million premises. Anticipated use of fiber-to-the-node/-to-the-basement/and distribution point, meanwhile, rose from 5.1 million premises that are RFS to 6.5 million.

Nbn’s planned use of FTTP (2 million to 2.5 million RFS) and fixed wireless and satellite technologies (900,000 to 1.1 million RFS) remain relatively steady.

According to IT News, nbn CEO Bill Morrow said the change in that deployment mix came after it was able to glean more data from the state of HFC networks it acquired from Telstra and Optus.

"[Last year] we didn't have contracts in place with equipment suppliers and delivery partners… and we lacked a lot of the data associated with exchange information from Telstra and Optus,” he said, according to the publication. We've been able to close all of that out through the year…The data that is available today changed the type of technology we should choose."

In the newly updated plan, nbn now anticipates annual revenue for fiscal year 2020 to be about $5 billion, with ARPU of $52.  As for the current state,  nbn has 2.9 million premises ready for service, and 1.1 million activated end users. Revenues were $421 million.

Once everything is in place, nbn expects to have 1-Gig available to 40% of Australians, 100 Mbps to 70%, and 100% getting 25 Mbps or more.

nbn noted that the projected top end of the peak funding range is now $46 million to $54 million, down from $46 million to $56 million, as it was able to minimize many of the uncertainties and cost assumptions in the business.

The government-backed group also noted that it’s fully funded for fiscal year 2017, but that it’s also exploring sources of external debt. Per IT News, nbn will still need to raise another $10 billion to meet its anticipated FY2018 requirement of $39.5 billion.

"We are confident we'll be able to obtain the necessary funds," Morrow said, noting that the process is already underway, according to the report.

nbn recently launched commercial broadband service on Telstra's  former HFC network in Ocean Reef, Western Australia, offering up to 100 Mbps down and 40 Mbps for its “retail service providers.”

nbn’s first commercial HFC services occurred in June in Redcliffe, Queensland, via the former Optus network.

Nbn, which uses an open access wholesale model and has tapped Arris as a partner for the HFC portion of its plan, said then that Optus, TPG and Exetel are offering HFC services at launch, with Telstra likely to be joining that group of sellers soon.

Nbn also has plans to launch DOCSIS 3.1 services and target gigabit speeds in the second half of 2017.

Google Fiber used Twitter to announce that it has launched the sign-up process in Salt Lake City, Utah, where it will be competing against incumbent providers Comcast and CenturyLink.

Per the Google Fiber Salt Lake City site, sign-ups are open until October 20 in the City Center area. The initial phase of the rollout covers about 112 blocks from 100 South to 800 South between 400 West and 1300 East, according to The Salt Lake City Tribune. 

News of the signups arrives about 17 months after Google announced it would bring services to Salt Lake City.

There, Google Fiber is offering 1-Gig residential service for $70 per month, a 100 Mbps Fiber 100 tier for $50 per month, with 1-Gig/pay TV bundles starting at $140 per month. Subscribers can add phone service for another $10 per month.

Google Fiber’s small business offerings include 1-Gig for $250 per month, 250 Mbps for $100 per month, and 100 Mbps for $70 per month. All Google data speeds are symmetrical and are offered without data caps.

CenturyLink offers 1-Gig to parts of Salt Lake City. Comcast sells a FTTP-based 2-Gbps service called "Gigabit Pro" to elligible homes in the market, but has not announced when it will introduce a new 1-Gig service based on DOCSIS 3.1 technology in Salt Lake that can ride its widely-deployed HFC network.

In addition to Salt Lake City, Google Fiber has launched service in parts of Austin, Texas; Nashville, Tenn.; Atlanta; Kansas City; and Provo, Utah.

It has committed to deploy in San Antonio; and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and has been considering expansions in Los Angeles; Chicago; Dallas; Portland, Ore.; San Jose, Irvine and San Diego, Calif.; Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Louisville, Ky.; and Jacksonville and Tampa, Fla.

Google Fiber, which will also offer service on a network being built by Huntsville Utilities, is also exploring wireless broadband technologies (subscription required) as it looks to further broaden its reach and accelerate its rate of deployment.

Setting its sights on a next-gen FTTP platform that can deliver 10 Gbps to the home, Verizon said it has tapped two vendors as it kicks off testing of NG-PON2 technology at its Innovation Lab in Waltham, Mass.

Later this month, Verizon will start to test equipment from Ericsson (in partnership with Calix) and Adtran. The tests will focus on NG-PON2 features such as tuning performance, the ability to carry residential and business services on the same platform, and interoperability and conformance tests against Verizon ONT specs.

The coming lab trials follow Verizon’s tests of NG-PON2 conducted in 2015 and the issuance of an RFP, holding then that the next-gen platform could “easily provide” symmetrical speeds of 10  Gbps to homes and business locations. 

Verizon noted that NG-PON2 supports up to 40-Gig of total capacity and up to 10 Gbps per customer, both up and down, on a single fiber.  Verizon said it plans to deploy NG-PON2 initially for business services in 2017, and then follow with residential rollouts “as the technology matures and the market demands.” The ITU-T approved NG-PON2 specs last year.

Verizon’s current high-end residential tier for Fios delivers 500 Mbps up and downstream; the telco has not announced when it might bump speeds up to 1-Gig to match up with the speeds being offered by AT&T (via GigaPower), Google Fiber, and various MSOs that are using DOCSIS 3.0 to offer downstream burst speeds approaching 1-Gig.

Verizon is also moving ahead with NG-PON2 as it braces for DOCSIS 3.1, a next-gen HFC platform that is capable of delivering multi-gigabit speeds. While the initial D3.1 specs envisioned capcities of 10-Gig down and at least 1-Gig up, a “full-duplex” flavor of D3.1 that can support high-capacity symmetrical speeds is under development at CableLabs.

Among MSOs, Comcast has kicked off advanced consumer trials of DOCSIS 3.1 in two markets – Atlanta and Nashville – and plans to expand the platform to three more markets (Chicago, Miami and Detroit) later this year.

AT&T said it is launching its fiber-fed GigaPower platform in parts of two more markets – San Diego, Calif.; and El Paso, Texas.

Service is being offered in a sub-segment of those areas.

In the San Diego region, GigaPower is being offered in portions of Carlsbad, San Diego and San Marcos, as well as more than a dozen area apartments, including a master-planned community called Civita in Mission Valley.

There, AT&T said it is offering 1-Gig standalone service starting at $70 per month

AT&T GigaPower offers internet speeds up to 1Gbps for as low as $70 a month. That “Premier” tier is available to customers who participate in AT&T Internet Preferences, the company’s targeted Web advertising program.

For the deployment in El Paso, 1-Gig is starting at $90 per month.

AT&T said its GigaPower network currently reaches more than 1.6 million locations in 24 metro areas with plans to extend it to 32 more areas at 14 million residential and commercial locations.

The anticipated breadth of that rollout plan has drawn some skepticism. CSG Consulting, for example, is wondering how the budget AT&T has allotted for wireline is enough for it to reach its stated goals.

Cable operators aren’t tossing out good HFC networks, but they are deploying fiber-only networks at in increasing rates in greenfields and other certain situations.

To get a fix on this trend, the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) and its global arm, the International Society of Broadband Experts (ISBE), have expanded their boot camp training program with one targeted to fiber networks deployment.

That new program, called the Fiber To The x (FTTx) Boot Camp, adds fiber passive optical network (PON) training, including installation, architecture, deployment and troubleshooting for GPON, EPON as well as RF over Glass (RFoG), a standard that enables MSOs to deliver their traditional services via RF on fiber while preserving their traditional backoffice and provisioning systems.

SCTE/ISBE, which recently launched a Boot Camp focused on DOCSIS 3.1, said the new FTTx-focused program will focus on PON architectures and offer comparisons to HFC, the disadvantages and advantages of various designs, and best practices for deploying and supporting FTTx.

“Time Warner Cable approached SCTE/ISBE to develop a program that could provide the industry with efficient training on FTTx technology, the advanced tools used to install and troubleshoot FTTx, and the creative approaches to problem-solving that the industry needs to realize the benefits of fiber deployments,” said Steve Harris, senior director, advanced technologies and instruction, learning and development, SCTE/ISBE. “We worked with Kevin Noll and the Time Warner Cable team to create an FTTx Boot Camp that combines industry technical expertise and SCTE/ISBE’s learning systems.  Our goal is to foster seamless fiber deployments for cable system operators as well as new opportunities for career advancement for the industry’s technical workforce.”

“Bringing fiber all the way to the customer premises increasingly is gaining traction as an option to expedite advanced services and to increase reliability of the network,” added Chris Bastian, senior vice president and CTO of SCTE/ISBE.  “SCTE/ISBE is working closely with our partners to make sure that current and next-generation workforces have the tools and talents that will allow operators to capture the ROI benefits that can accompany FTTx.”

SCTE/ISBE said cable organizations can contact Steve Harris at sharris@scte.org to schedule the two-day FTTx Boot Camp at a location of their choice. SCTE/ISBE also will host the FTTx Boot Camp Sunday through Monday, Sept. 25–26 in Philadelphia, immediately prior to the start of Cable-Tec Expo 2016. 

AT&T has launched its fiber-based GigaPower platform in the tech-savvy Bay Area, reaching parts of San Francisco, San Jose, Dublin, Mountain View, Santa Clara and San Ramon.

Early on, AT&T is offering 1-Gig to nearly 30 apartment buildings in the region, including Lumina, a 655-unit residential waterfront condo in the Rincon Hill neighborhood. Notably,  Google Fiber has accelerated its its move into San Francisco by using existing fiber there to deliver services to certain apartments, condos and housing properties in the market. Comcast offers a symmetrical 2 Gbps residential service called Gigabit Pro in the Bay Area  that uses FTTP.

The latest batch of AT&T GigaPower deployments in the Bay Area are tacked on to the portions of Cupertino where at AT&T initially launched the fiber-fed service in 2015.

As for the latest deployment, customers in “tens of thousands of area homes, apartments and small businesses” in the Bay Area now have access to 1-Gig service delivered on the telco’s fiber-based GigaPower platform.

There, AT&T is offering 1-Gig standalone service starting at $70 per month.

AT&T, which merged with DirecTV last summer, said its GigaPower network is currently available in over 1.6 million locations across 22 U.S. metro areas, with plans to extend it to 34 more areas.

"By expanding GigaPower to additional cities in the Bay Area beyond Cupertino, we are demonstrating our continued commitment to our customers whose appetite for high speed data continues to grow,”Jeni Bell, vice president and general manager, Northern California and Northern Nevada at AT&T, said in a statement. “As the ways in which we communicate and seek entertainment become more data-intensive, our customers will benefit from our expansion of our GigaPower service.”

AT&T said it has lit up its fiber-based GigaPower platform in parts of Oklahoma City, Okla., while expanding 1-Gig deployments in Atlanta, Kansas City and Los Angeles.

The Oklahoma City deployment includes greater Canadian and Cleveland counties. In that market, AT&T’s standalone 1-Gig offering starts at $110 per month (AT&T's “Premier” plans require that customers participate in a targeted advertising program called AT&T Internet Preferences). 

The Atlanta extensions are bringing GigaPower to parts of Douglasville, Grayson, McDonough, Peachtree Corners and surrounding communities, with standalone 1-Gig starting at $70 per month.

AT&T has also branched further into the L.A. area with GigaPower launches in Corona, Fontana, Glendale, and Riverside, with standalone 1-Gig starting at $110 per month.

In Kansas City, Google Fiber’s first launched market, GigaPower is now extending into parts of Westwood, and matching up with 1-Gig starting at $70 per month.

AT&T also introduced 1-Gig for business customers in San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas and Miami.

AT&T estimates that GigaPower is currently available to 1.6 million locations in 21 metros. The telco has plans to offer GigaPower to parts of 35 more areas and a total of 14 million residential and commercial fiber-to-the-premises locations.

Virgin Media, the U.K.’s largest MSO, is adding a bit more fiber to its network diet.

The operator, now owned by Liberty Global, said it will deploy fiber-to-the-premises to at least a quarter of the 4 million additional homes and businesses tied to “Project Lightning,” an initiative introduced last year.

Virgin Media said it has already started to deploy FTTP in Cambridgeshire and Leicestershire, with work expected to start soon in  West Yorkshire, Devon and East Sussex. The MSO noted that its using “narrow trenching” and other engineering techniques to deploy FTTP in high-demand areas costs that are lower and at a pace that is more rapid than traditional fiber buildouts.

With the planned expansion, Virgin Media said it expects to have 17 million homes connected to its network by 2019. The MSO said it’s adding FTTP to the mix amid a recent finding from regulator Ofcom that the U.K. has the lowest proportion of fiber connections running directly to homes and businesses of any country that’s part of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

The MSO said its updated plan “are a significant boost to the UK’s ambitions to become a ‘fibre nation’.”

Its HFC network, which represents most of its footprint, today offers downstream speeds of up to 200 Mbps for residential customers and up to 300 Mbps for businesses.

Virgin Media said Project Lightning has already connected 250,000 new premises, and has created 2,100 jobs in the UK. This year, it expects to connect 500,000 new premises, and create another 500 jobs.

“Our £3bn investment to bring ultrafast connectivity to more parts of the UK is not just about better broadband, it’s about future-proofing the country’s network infrastructure with the best and most modern technology,” Virgin Media CEO tom Mockridge said in a statement. 

Google Fiber has launched services in Nashville, starting with a small number of apartment buildings and condos.

Per Google Fiber’s “apartment finder” for that market, it’s installed at Element Music Row, Icon In the Gulch, Bristol On Broadway, and Rhythm at Music Row, with many other multiple-dwelling units on tap. Google has also opened its first "Fiber Space" store in Nashville, The Tennessean and other local media outlets reported.

Google Fiber confirmed that the initial rollout in Nashville comes from the early progress of its own network buildout in Nashville, and not another example of it using existing infrastructure to reach MDUs as it’s begun to do in Atlanta ahead of its own network deployment.

Google Fiber has already released pricing in Nashville. Its 1-Gig standalone service runs $70 per month, with no install fee for apartments and condos, while its 1-Gig/TV combo starts at $130 per month. Customers can added the recently introduced  Google Fiber Phone service for an extra $10 per month. Google  Fiber is also selling a 100 Mbps service in Nashville for $50 per month.

In addition to Atlanta and Nashville, Google Fiber has also launched service in Kansas City; Austin, Texas; and Provo, Utah; and has committed to deploy in Salt Lake City; San Antonio; and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.

It’s also mulling expansions in Chicago; Portland, Ore.; Los Angeles, San Jose, Irvine and San Diego, Calif.; Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Louisville, Ky.; and Jacksonville and Tampa, Fla.

In Nashville, Google Fiber will come up against incumbent MSO, Comcast, which has identified Nashville as one of a handful of markets that will get gigabit broadband service on the new DOCSIS 3.1 platform later this year. Comcast launched an advanced consumer trial of a D3.1-based service in Atlanta last month. Comcast also offers Gigabit Pro, a fiber-based 2 Gbps residential service, in Nashville to eligible homes (those within one-third of a mile of Comcast’s fiber network).

Nashville is also a deployment city for GigaPower, AT&T's fiber-based platform. 

Verizon’s fiber-based Fios platform will finally extend into Boston following a commitment by the telco to invest more than $300 million over the next six years.

Verizon, which tangles with Comcast and RCN in Boston, said construction of the FTTP network will be completed on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, starting this year in Dorchester, West Roxbury and the Dudley Square neighborhood of Roxbury, and follow with Hyde Park, Mattapan, and other areas of Roxbury and Jamaica Plain.

Verizon said Boston has also “agreed to provide an expedited permitting process to encourage this build.”

Sharing some similarities with Google Fiber’s “rally” process and use of “Fiberhoods,” , Verizon and Boston are also asking consumers to “vote” in order to bump them up higher on the priority list as the Fios expands across the city. Under that plan, Boston has been divided into four groups (A,B,C, and D), with each group divided into “Fiber Zones.”

Notably, the site dedicated to that process notes that there must be a “minimum level of interest in order to bring Fios” to specific Fiber Zones. Groups A and B will be targeted during the first couple years of the build, followed by C and D. Voting for Group A continues through July 3, 2016, while voting on Group B is set to close on September 4, 2016. 

In an FAQ about the fiber project, Verizon said it expects to start building the network in Boston this summer, and launch services in select areas by "early 2017." 

"We estimate the build throughout the city will take 5-6 years, as we complete one area and expand to others. This is a big project, but Fiber Zones allow for more rapid deployment," the telco said. 

In addition to Fios residential services and “advanced business services,” Verizon said it has also committed to improving its 4G LTE network and a pledge to “usher in 5G.”

To assist on the mobile side, Boston will also take friction out of Verizon’s ability to attach wireless equipment to city street lights and utility poles.

The city also announced, as a next step, that it will begin the cable television licensing process that will help Verizon to launch Fios TV service in Boston.

Verizon and Boston will also work together on a way to bring new tech and services to low-income residents, kicked off by a $100,000 “Digital Equity” contribution to Boston that will be used for a new mobile hotspot lending program at the Boston Public Library. Also factored in is a “Smart Cities” trial focused on addressing traffic safety and congestion along the Massachusetts Avenue Vision Zero Priority Corridor. 

“Boston is moving faster than our current infrastructure can support, and a modern fiber-optic communications platform will make us a next-level city,” Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh said in a statement. “Additionally, it is a priority to ensure that every resident has expanded access to broadband and increasing competition is critical to reaching that goal. I thank Verizon for their investment in Boston and for partnering with the city to provide the foundation for future technology growth.”

“This transformation isn’t just about advanced new fiber-optic technology – it’s about the innovative services this platform will allow people to create and use, today and in the future,” added Verizon Wireline Network president Bob Mudge. “We are delivering the promise of the digital world to families, schools and medical facilities, businesses and entrepreneurs, while strengthening our neighborhoods and communities. We are a proud partner in building toward a brighter, shared future.”

Google Fiber has quietly dropped a “Basic” Internet service in its first markets – Kansas City, Mo., and Kansas City, Kan. – that delivered 5 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up to customers who agreed to pay a “construction” fee up front, but is pushing ahead with plans to offer free gigabit service to public housing connected to its network. 

In Kansas City, Google Fiber still offers its 1-Gig standalone broadband service for $70 per month as well as a 1-Gig/TV combo starting at $130 per month (it’s currently waiving a $100 installation fee to customers who commit for a year), and now complements those with a “Fiber 100” offering that delivers symmetrical speeds of up 100 Mbps for $50 per month, via its same fiber-to-the-premises platform. All of Google Fiber’s broadband service plans remain cap-free. Although Google Fiber is dropping the free option for new customers in Kansas City, existing customers on that plan will reportedly be able to keep it. 

Google Fiber reasons that the Basic product has been criticized for not meeting the needs of consumers it was meant for, and that a new product that delivers free gigabit broadband service to all public housing properties that are connected to it network is a better approach to reach people who aren’t online today. That free option for qualified properties, Google Fiber confirmed, will be starting in Kansas City on May 19. Google Fiber announced that initiative in February, noting then that it was moving ahead to connect up to nine properties that serve more than 1,300 families in the area via the program.

Additionally, Google Fiber said it also believes that the launch of the new Fiber 100 service will provide a less expensive option for customers who may not be quite ready for 1-Gig.

In the meantime, Google Fiber is still promoting the free Basic service in markets such as Austin, Texas; and Provo, Utah.  However, Basic is also not among the options in Atlanta, where Google Fiber is building its network,  but, early on, is using existing fiber infrastructure to reach select apartment buildings in the city.

Google Fiber, which recently introduced a landline phone service, has also committed to deploy in Salt Lake City; San Antonio; Nashville, Tenn.; and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. It’s considering expansions in Chicago; Portland, Ore.; Los Angeles, San Jose, Irvine and San Diego, Calif.; Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Louisville, Ky.; and Jacksonville and Tampa, Fla.

Following an initial foray into Los Angeles late last year, AT&T said it has expanded the reach of its fiber-based “GigaPower” platform to additional parts of the metro area spanning “tens of thousands of locations.”

The expansion, covering single family homes, apartments and small businesses, covers portions of Eastvale, Irvine, Los Angeles, and Orange County.

AT&T said it expects to triple availability of GigaPower in the area by the end of 2016, including Arcadia and Glendale.

In L.A., GigaPower’s standalone 1-Gig broadband service starts at $110 per month, or 300 Mbps starting at $80 per month, for customers on a “Premier” plan that requires participation in AT&T Internet Preferences, its targeted Web advertising program. Customers can also bolt on TV service from DirecTV or U-verse, and bundle in phone service.

AT&T said it has invested more than $2 billion in its L.A.-area wireless and wireline networks from 2012 to 2014.

AT&T noted that GigaPower is now offered in 20 metros (with plans to add another 36 metro areas), and ended 2015 with access to north of 1 million locations, a number that it intends to double by the end of the year. AT&T has not announced how many subscribers are on its GigaPower platform. 

Verizon has launched new TV spots that tout Fios’s “100% fiber optic network” while taking a few jabs at its cable competition.

“Fios is not cable. We’re wired differently,” the ad proclaims. “We are a 100% fiber-optic network…and fiber-optic networks move at the speed of light.”

The ad then talks up some of the awards that Fios has racked up, including the top ratings for Internet speed from PC Magazine, and J.D. Power customer service ratings. It later brings up Fios’s symmetrical broadband capabilities, something that the cable industry is looking to match with a proposed “Full Duplex” capability for DOCSIS 3.1, a new multi-gigabit platform for HFC networks. 

Watch the ad below:

Verizon’s all-fiber claims in the new ad might grab the attention of rival Cablevision Systems, which has previously filed lawsuits challenging ads from the telco that claim that Fios uses 100% fiber optics, because the service, for example, relies on coax (via MoCA) for distribution in the customer’s home.

But Verizon claims its new ads highlight the difference between Fios and cable offerings.

“The new TV spots are intended to do one thing: make it clear to cable customers that there is a difference between Fios and cable,” Tami Erwin, Verizon’s senior vice president and group president, consumer and mass business sales and service, said in a statement. “Our Fios network is based on superior fiber optic technology, which means only our customers enjoy upload speeds as fast as download speeds at a better price than cable can offer. On top of that, our Fios network has been recognized by the leading customer satisfaction surveys year after year. That’s something we’re very proud of.”

AT&T said it has expanded the reach of GigaPower, its fiber-based 1-Gig platform for residential and business customers, to additional parts of five more markets:

-Chicago: Hampshire, Munster and St. John  (standalone 1-Gig starts at $110 per month)

-Miami: Coral Springs, North Miami and Tamarac (standalone 1-Gig starts at $110 per month)

-Dallas/Fort Worth: Richardson (standalone 1-Gig starts at $110 per month)

-Houston: Friendswood, Pearland, Manvel and Missouri City (standalone 1-Gig starts at $110 per month)

-San Antonio: Converse (standalone 1-Gig starts at $70 per month)

AT&T originally debuted GigaPower in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area on Aug. 14, 2014;  in Houston on April 6, 2015; in Chicago on April 20, 2015; in Miami on May 4, 2015; and in San Antonio on Sept. 28, 2015. 

AT&T, which acquired DirecTV last July, said it currently offers GigaPower to parts of 20 metros, with plans to expand it to 36 more.

Google Fiber’s ambitions have drawn both bearish and bullish views from analysts, but new data from the U.S. Copyright Office shows that the initiative is not yet setting the world on fire, at least with respect to the number of video customers who have signed on so far. 

Google Fiber ended 2015 with just north of 53,000 video subs, according to a blog post from MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett that pointed to fresh data from the U.S. Copyright Office.

The number's a bit of a mixed bag. In Moffett's view, Google Fiber’s rate of video growth is strong, but should be stronger. 

“The number of subscribers to Google's fiber service remains astonishingly low,” Moffett noted. Though the percentage growth rate for Google Fiber is high, he said the surprise is that the growth rate isn’t higher.  "After all, there has been a steady stream of new cities announced, and they’ve now been at it for a long time in at least a handful of markets," he wrote. 

According to Moffett’s analysis, Google Fiber ended Q4 2015 with 53,390 video subs, up from 28,867 a year earlier. Among individual service areas, it ended the year with about 12,189 video subs in Kansas City, Kan., on a base of 53,925 homes in the city (22.6% penetration), a 16.8% penetration in Kansas City, Mo. (37,338 subs on a base of 221,860 homes in the city); and 8.2% penetration in Provo, Utah (2,718 subs on 33.212 homes).  Google Fiber, he found, also has 941 video subs in Austin, Texas.

The addition of fewer than 12,000 subs over a six month span “for a service that has generated this kind of fanfare isn’t terribly impressive,” he said, noting that Google Fiber now represents about 5/100ths of 1% of the U.S. pay TV market. “As a stand-alone entity, Google Fiber would be approximately 1/7th the size of the smallest distribution company in our firm’s coverage, Cable One.  They are 1/15th the size of Mediacom, and just over 1/70th the size of the new U.S. Altice (assuming Altice’s deal for Cablevision successfully closes).”

Of course, Google Fiber’s video numbers don’t provide the full picture of its true progress. After all, Google Fiber tends to lead with a standalone 1 Gbps service that costs $70 per month. It also offers a double-play (1 Gig and pay TV), and also offers a free basic Internet service (5 Mbps down by 1 Mbps up)  to customers who spring for the $300 construction fee.

Moffett said his findings are not a suggestion that Google isn’t “doing well,” and did note that the numbers don’t factor in broadband.

“[W]e presume that Google has many more broadband subscribers than video ones.  Still, this latest data is a useful barometer of just how slowly all this happens, and just how tiny Google Fiber remains in the grand scheme of things," he said. 

And he is puzzled at Google Fiber’s apparent lack of progress and low penetration in Provo, where it acquired iProvo, then the area’s municipal fiber service provider, for $1, plus a pledge to complete and expand on the buildout there.

“Over the past six months, they have added exactly 65 subscribers in Provo.  Yes, you read that correctly.  There are no decimal places missing," Moffett wrote, while later pointing out that Google Fiber represents a large piece of Alphabet’s “other bets.”

Those other bets, which include Google Fiber and moonshot project like self-driving cars, lost $3.56 billion in 2015, alongside revenues of $448 million.

But others who watch Google Fiber closely believe that the initiative is poised to make a serious dent in the market and become a profitable enterprise.

Incumbents, Bernstein Research analyst Carlos Kirjner warned in a recent research note, should not get “too complacent” in the face of Google’s slow and limited progress so far.

In a note issued today, Kirjner noted that Alphabet and Google CFO Ruth Porat made comments at an investor conference this week reiterating that the company is taking a long-term view with Google Fiber, expecting it to morph into a sustainable, stand-alone business.

Google Fiber has also been mixing up its game plan a bit, and has begun to complementing its expanding reach by tapping into existing infrastructure (in San Francisco and Atlanta, for example), or to ride on top of municipally-owned fiber networks (as it’s set to do in Huntsville, Ala.) to accelerate its ability to offer services.

And that’s on top of Google Fiber’s commitments to deploy in Salt Lake City, Utah; Atlanta;  Austin and San  Antonio, Texas; Nashville, Tenn.; and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, N.C. It’s also mulling expansions in Chicago; Portland, Ore.; Los Angeles, San Jose, Irvine and San Diego, Calif.; Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Louisville, Ky.; and Jacksonville and Tampa, Fla.

But that’s still not enough to sway Moffett. “Over the past week, Google has made a number of splashy announcements,” he wrote. “Taken together, they have a rather provisional feel, as if the company is still experimenting. Or perhaps their goal is simply to showcase as many different models as they can think of, creating a menu of choices that they hope more and more municipalities will emulate (ideally without Google’s help).” 

Cox Communications said it has begun to roll out “G1GABLAST,” its 1 Gbps residential broadband service, in Tucson, Ariz., with an initial deployment set for The Place @ Presidio Trails, a new development with one- two- and three bedroom apartment homes.

Update: Cox will sell G1GABLAST in Tucson for  $119.99 per month as a standalone, and $99.99 per month when bundled with other Cox services. The offering includes a WiFi router, one terabyte of cloud storage, the Cox Security Suite and Family Protection service, and 10 email boxes (15 gigabytes of storage for each address).

Cox, which launched 1-Gig in Phoenix in 2014, said G1GABLAST is now live in parts of ten states, and that it’s on track to offer gigabit broadband in all markets by the end of 2016. Cox has also deployed G1GABLAST in parts of Oklahoma; Rhode Island; Las Vegas; Omaha; San Diego; Orange County; Baton Rouge; Hampton Roads, Va.; Northwest Arkansas; Wichita;  and Tulsa.

In the early going, Cox is using FTTP to deliver residential 1-Gig in select areas, but will also deliver those faster speeds on its more widely deployed HFC network using DOCSIS 3.1 technology.

 “We are excited to deliver the choice of gigabit speeds to our customers,” said Cox Communications president Pat Esser, in a statement. “Coupled with our 250 employees in southern Arizona and more than 24,000 nationwide, our latest investments and the deployment of the fastest speeds available are powering economic growth and development for businesses and residents of the communities we serve.”

Taking a similar path it first paved in Atlanta, Google Fiber said it is accelerating its move into San Francisco by using existing fiber there to deliver services to certain apartments, condos and housing properties in the market.

“To date, we’ve focused mostly on building fiber-optic networks from scratch. Now, as Google Fiber grows, we’re looking for more ways to serve cities of different shapes and sizes,” Michael Slinger, director of business operations, Google Fiber, said in this blog post.

Also of note, Google Fiber announced this week that it will offer services on a planned municipal fiber network being built in Huntsville, Ala.

“By using existing fiber to connect some apartments and condos, as we’ve done before, we can bring service to residents more quickly. This approach will allow us to serve a portion of San Francisco, complementing the City’s ongoing efforts to bring abundant, high-speed Internet to the City by the Bay,” Slinger wrote.

Google Fiber has not announced details on service and the launch timeline in San Francisco, where it will compete with Comcast, which offers a symmetrical 2 Gbps residential service called Gigabit Pro that uses FTTP, and AT&T, which has tagged S.F. for expansion of its fiber-based GigaPower service. However, Google Fiber has set up a website where area residents can keep tabs on service deployment developments.

With San Francisco added in, Google Fiber said it has committed to bring its mix of gigabit and pay TV services to ten metro areas. Others on that list include parts of Kansas City; Provo, and Salt Lake City, Utah; Atlanta;  Austin and San  Antonio, Texas; Nashville, Tenn.; and Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, N.C.

Google Fiber is also exploring expansions in Chicago; Portland, Ore.; Los Angeles, San Jose, Irvine and San Diego, Calif.; Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Louisville, Ky.; and Jacksonville and Tampa, Fla.

Shedding light on a deployment strategy that could potentially help it accelerate service availability in other cities around the country, Google Fiber confirmed that has tapped into some existing fiber infrastructure in the Atlanta area to deliver service to a select number of apartment buildings in the city’s suburbs.  

The select use of existing infrastructure ties into a much grander construction and service rollout plan Google Fiber has underway in the city.

Last January, Google Fiber announced plans to launch service in the Atlanta metro area, including nearby Avondale Estates, Brookhaven, College Park, Decatur, East Point, Hapeville, Sandy Springs and Smyrna. Google Fiber has since begun construction in the Atlanta metro area, but has not announced when it will launch services there.

However, the targeted use of existing infrastructure in the area is giving Google Fiber a head start with respect to an initial small number of apartment buildings in the region.

“Making great progress building the Fiber network for Metro Atlanta,” Google Fiber said via this post on Google Plus that also announced the launch of a new Web-based Apartment Finder tool.  “We’re even starting to connect a few buildings to help us get ready. If you live in an apartment or condo, check our Apartment Finder to see if your building is on track to get #GoogleFiber: fiber.google.com/atlanta/apartments.”

While the vast majority of the Atlanta-area apartments currently surfaced by the new tool indicate that “Fiber is coming,” at least two of those locations (Westbury Park, at 1295 Franklin Drive SE in Marietta; and Wesley Plantation, 3575 Peachtree Industrial Blvd. in Duluth) note that there’s “Fiber installed.”

Google Fiber isn’t saying whose existing infrastructure it’s using in the Atlanta area to connect and serve those venues, but did note that the strategy could help Google Fiber more rapidly expand the availability of service in the area.

“We want to bring Google Fiber to as many residents in Metro Atlanta as possible, which is why we’re building a brand new fiber network across nine cities in the area,” a Google Fiber spokesperson said, in a statement. “In addition to the construction that’s already underway, we’re connecting some apartment buildings in the suburbs of Atlanta using existing infrastructure so we can reach more people with gigabit speeds.”

Update: In Atlanta, Google Fiber has also added a new wrinkle to its service pricing. While its stand-alone 1-Gig service ($70 per month) and its Gigabit+TV bundle (starting at $130 per month) is similar to the pricing and packaging offered in other launched markets, in Atlanta Google Fiber is also marketing a “Basic” 100 Mbps broadband service for $50 per month.  In other markets where it has launched service, Google Fiber has been offering a free tier, also called “Basic,” that limits speeds to 5 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up, if customers agree to pay a construction fee. AT&T has also rolled out its fiber-based "GigaPower" service to parts of the Atlanta area ($70 per month for standalone 1-Gig, $120 when bundled with TV service, and $150 when combined with TV and U-verse voice). 

In Atlanta, Google Fiber will tangle with Comcast, which currently offers a fiber-based symmetrical 2 Gbps residential broadband service there called Gigabit Pro. Comcast has also identified Atlanta as one of a handful of markets where it will roll out DOCSIS 3.1 on its widely deployed HFC network later this year. Comcast expects to deploy D3.1 in Atlanta and Nashville in "early 2016" to deliver gigabit broadband service, but has not yet revealed pricing.  

It’s not yet clear if Google Fiber intends to use existing infrastructure in other cities. “We’re always looking for ways to bring Google Fiber to as many people as possible, but we don’t have any further plans to announce at this time,” the spokesperson added.

Google Fiber has launched its mix of gigabit broadband and pay TV services in parts of Kansas City (Kansas and Missouri); Provo, Utah; and Austin Texas.

In addition to the metro Atlanta area, Google Fiber also has network buildouts  underway in Salt Lake City; San Antonio; Nashville; Raleigh-Durham, and Charlotte.

Google Fiber is also exploring expansions in Chicago; Portland, Ore.; Los Angeles, San Jose, Irvine and San Diego, Calif.; Phoenix; Oklahoma City; Louisville, Ky.; and Jacksonville and Tampa, Fla.

Following a partnership forged last year with ConnectHome, Google Fiber announced plans today to offer free gigabit broadband service to all public housing properties that are connected to it network.

“Families in these properties will be able to access some of the fastest speeds, at no cost to the housing authority or to residents,” Google Fiber VP Dennis Kish said in this blog post about the program. 

Google Fiber and the Housing Authority of Kansas City introduced the program today at West Bluff, the first property that will receive free gigabit service via the program. Google Fiber is now moving ahead to connect up to nine properties serving more than 1,300 families in the area via the program.

Kish said Google Fiber wired all 100 homes there and have opened up sign ups, adding that they’ll also be able to buy discounted devices and learn new computer skills through ConnectHome partners, including Connecting for Good and Surplus Exchange.

“Looking forward, we plan to bring gigabit Internet to select affordable housing in all of our Fiber cities,” Kish said.

Google Fiber sells its standalone 1-Gig service for $70 per month, and offers a free “basic” Internet service (5 Mbps down by 1 Mbps) up to customers in “Fiberhoods” who pay a one-time $300 construction fee (or $25 per month for 12 months).

Google Fiber also offers service to parts of Provo, Utah; and Austin, Texas, and has buildouts underway in Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Nashville, Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte. It’salso exploring deployments in Chicago; Los Angeles; Portland, Ore.; San Jose, Irvine and San Diego, Calif.; Phoenix, Ariz.; Oklahoma City; Louisville, Ky.; and Jacksonville and Tampa, Fla.

AT&T said it has expanded service for AT&T  GigaPower, its fiber-based broadband platform for residential and small business customers to parts of four markets – Atlanta, Chicago, Miami and Dallas/Ft. Worth.

Here’s how the latest batch of GigaPower expansions breaks down:

-Atlanta,  including Buford, Jonesboro, Lawrenceville, Norcross, Roswell, Sugar Hill and Suwanee. Standalone 1-Gig service there starts at $70 per month, $120 per month with TV service, and $150 per month for a triple-play.

-Chicago, including Pingree Grove, Plano and Sugar Grove. In that market, standalone 1-Gig starts at $110 per month, while a pay TV bundle starts at $150 per month, and a triple-play bundle starting at $180 per month.

-Miami, including Cooper City, Miami Lakes, Miramar, Pembroke Pines and Plantation. GigaPower pricing there follows AT&T’s pricing for the Chicago area.

-Dallas/Ft. Worth, including Cedar Hill, Colleyville, DeSoto, Joshua, Keene, Keller, Lakeside, Little Elm and Roanoke. GigaPower pricing in Dallas/Ft. Worth mirrors AT&T’ pricing for Chicago.

Customers in those markets have the option to pair GigaPower with DirecTV or U-verse TV services.

Notably, Atlanta, Chicago, and Miami are among the initial handful of markets that Comcast has ticketed for DOCSIS 3.1 to deliver gigabit broadband on its widely deployed HFC network later this year. 

AT&T said GigaPower is now available in 20 major metros, and is moving forward on expansions that will extend service to parts of another 36.

Cox Communications said it has lit up its 1-Gig residential offering,  “Gigablast” in Oklahoma, and now offers the new service to parts of ten states.

Cox announced the service launch today at the Oklahoma State Capitol. 

Cox is initially using FTTP to deliver gigabit speeds, but also has plans to use DOCSIS 3.1, an emerging multi-gigabit platform for HFC networks as Cox fulfills its plan to begin market- wide deployment of Gigabit services by the end of 2016. 

Cox has also launched Gigablast in parts of Rhode Island; Phoenix; Las Vegas; Omaha; San Diego; Orange County; Baton Rouge; Hampton Roads, Va.; Northwest Arkansas; Wichita;  and Tulsa. The MSO has been selling the 1-Gig service for $35 per month when bundled with other Cox services, or $99 per month as a standalone.

"This is an important development for Oklahoma, adding another quality of life factor that will help lure more businesses, families and young people to our state," Governor Fallin said, in a statement.

"Coupled with our 1,800 employees in Oklahoma and more than 24,000 nationwide, our latest investments and the deployment of the fastest speeds available are powering economic growth and development for businesses and residents of the communities we serve,”  added Cox president Pat Esser. 

U.S. cable has been routing the telco competition on the broadband front, but a top industry analyst says he’s concerned about whether MSOs can sustain their rate of growth as the DSL opportunity dissipates and operators face more competition from fiber-fed ISPs.

“Cable’s victory in broadband is turning into a rout,” Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson explained in a research note issued Wednesday. “But beneath the surface there are reasons for watchfulness, if not for outfight concern, for cable.”

He said U.S. broadband is “rapidly approaching saturation” while the pool of DSL subs from which cable has drawn from is likewise “rapidly dwindling.” In Q3, cable captured 118% of market growth in broadband, as the rate of growth accelerated to 6.4% -- “the fastest pace in years.” The telcos, meanwhile, lost ground.

As for threats, Moffett points the finger at AT&T, which  is expanding the reach of its fiber-based  GigaPower platform. Moffett, who also accounts for FTTP and advanced DSL competition coming from Google Fiber, CenturyLink and  Windstream, also said AT&T’s strategy to migrate more pay TV subs to the DirecTV platform will enable the telco to repurpose capacity so it can offer speeds of at least 25 Mbps more broadly and, thus, compete with cable more directly on a speed basis.

“We are approaching the ceiling,” Moffett wrote, noting that broadband service today has a penetration rate of 79% in the U.S. However broadband is available to 96% of U.S. homes, so the homes that have the option to buy Internet service from a residential wireline ISP is actually 81%.

Another barrier to adoption growth, he said, is that 61% of non-broadband subs don’t own a computer, and 48% earn less than $25,000 per year, which could keep some consumers priced out of the market.

Given that full scenario, Moffett’s updated model now calls for residential wired broadband penetration to rise to 86% of occupied U.S. homes, or 89.6% of homes that can get wired broadband, within five years. That, he said, represents a further deceleration to 1 point of penetration per year versus today’s 2.3 points per year.

“To maintain momentum, cable operators will have to take share from FTTN…buildouts that offer meaningfully higher speeds than legacy DSL," he added.  “Can they?”

With everything factored in, Moffett now projects that cable’s long-term share versus DSL will rise to 90%, its share versus IP-DSLAM will increase to 70%, while its share versus fiber-to-the-node and  FTTH will stay at 55% and 40%, respectively.

Comcast confirmed that the MSO has expanded the availability of Gigabit Pro, its FTTP-based symmetrical 2 Gbps residential broadband service, to the Northeast Division, which serves about 8 million customers across more than a dozen states, including Maine, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

A user on the DSL Reports message board posted a revised Gigabit Pro coverage map illustrating the expansion.

Comcast’s current (older) Gigabit Pro availability map identifies other towns and cities that have access in parts of California, Utah, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Washington, Minnesota, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, and Oregon.

Comcast started to sell Gigabit Pro in July for a promotional price of $159 per month; the general price for the up-capped service is $299.95 per month. It’s subject to a two-year agreement and fees of up to $500 for installation and $500 for activation.

Comcast introduced Gigabit Pro in April, announcing then that it would make it available to 18 million customers by the end of 2015. To get it, customers must be within a third of a mile of the MSO’s fiber network.

Comcast is deploying Gigabit Pro on a demand-driven basis, only pulling fiber and installing the necessary home-side gear to customers who sign up for it. The operator is also looking to offer gigabit speeds on broader basis on its HFC network using the emerging DOCSIS 3.1 platform. 

It's been a big week for gigabit expansions. AT&T announced yesterday it was expanding GigaPower to parts of 38 metros, while Google Fiber revealed plans today to explore buildouts in two major U.S. cities -- Chicago and Los Angeles.