Getting fiber for home Internet used to be almost like trying to win the lottery. Google would pick a city and then AT&T would magically announce it was going to that city too. Meanwhile, the rest of the country would grumble and grouse, wondering if it was worth moving to Kansas City.
AT&T Promises to Bring Fiber to Places Where Google Isn’t
It’s adding service in 38 cities over the next year, including San Francisco, Detroit and Cleveland.
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That has slowly been changing, though, as AT&T has sped up its plans while Google remains far more limited. Now AT&T is announcing a significant expansion of its service, with plans to more than double the places with high-speed connections over the next year. Fiber allows speeds of one gigabit per second and above, far faster than most other high-speed Internet technologies.
AT&T is bringing it’s GigaPower service to cities like Detroit, Cleveland and San Francisco. (See below for the full list.)
The company is launching service now in Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, Fla. Previously, AT&T offered service in part or all of about 20 metropolitan areas while Google is live in three markets. AT&T said it now reaches one million homes and businesses and plans to double that next year and eventually reach 14 million addresses with fiber service.
In October, Google Fiber announced it was adding three new markets, putting the total planned cities at fifteen in addition to its three active ones. From the cities on AT&T’s map, only San Jose and San Diego overlap with those Google is eying among the new markets.
Comcast has also been quick to announce plans for faster Internet just as fiber was coming to that city.
Google’s CFO has said that the conglomeration plans to continue its investment in Google Fiber, which is now a division of the separate Alphabet company called (for now) Access and Energy.
Here’s the full list of cities slated to get fiber service through AT&T:
The 38 metro areas that AT&T will be entering, starting with the launch of service in parts of the Los Angeles and West Palm Beach metro areas today, are:
- Alabama: Birmingham, Huntsville, Mobile and Montgomery
- Arkansas: Fort Smith/Northwest Arkansas and Little Rock
- California: Bakersfield, Fresno, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco and San Jose
- Florida: Pensacola and West Palm Beach
- Georgia: Augusta
- Indiana: Indianapolis
- Kansas: Wichita
- Kentucky: Louisville
- Louisiana: Baton Rouge, Shreveport-Bossier, Jefferson Parish region and the Northshore
- Mississippi: Jackson
- Missouri: St. Louis
- Michigan: Detroit
- Nevada: Reno
- North Carolina: Asheville
- Ohio: Cleveland and Columbus
- Oklahoma: Oklahoma City and Tulsa
- South Carolina: Charleston, Columbia and Greenville
- Tennessee: Memphis
- Texas: El Paso and Lubbock
- Wisconsin: Milwaukee
Additional reporting by Mark Bergen.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
