My area has AT&T Uverse and Comcast overlap and it is rather funny to hear from the Uverse sales people that go around door to door. They tried to sell me once and claimed everyone gets an independent line to the pole and they just upgraded their network. My response was "you are offering me, for the same price, an inferior speed product WITH a datacap..." Yeah, let me jump right on that.
Well technically, that is the truth. DSL is not like cable where it's split and shared everywhere. DSL gets a dedicated pair to each and every house (after they cut out all the bridge taps, of course).
Woohoo!!!
AT&T isn't fiber to the home. They like to use the "F-word" as a marketing gimmick. It's really only their backbone that's fiber.
Nope, there are plenty of fiber to the home customers (FTTP). Due to both plant (the buried fiber) and software limitations, the speed cap is 18/1.5mbps. Ass backwards, but it is what it is.
In some markets, such as Austin, TX, they DO have fiber to home. These markets will be upgraded and speed boosted dramatically over the course of this year.
As to someone else who said Uverse has data caps. They do and they don't. Real Uverse has a data cap of 250gb that has never(and to my knowledge will never) be enforced. Fake Uverse, has a 150GB data cap that is enforced.
This is pretty much the current state of the data cap, and it's very much confirmed. "Real" Uverse has a cap on paper, but they do nothing about it if you go over it.
45mbps on bonded pairs started rolling out last August. I am still waiting for it were I am at even though it has been officially rolled out here for quite a while and has rolled out in most uverse markets. I am less than 300ft from the vrad. The vrad however hasn't been updated with new cards yet. There is no eta one when that may be even though the VRAD is less than .5 miles from an ATT Uverse Service Depot.
The VRADs are all supposed to have K cards by "sometime" in 2014. This is AT&T though, so take that at face value. They're getting really big on matching cable company internet speeds, so we're all assuming that the speed increases will be sooner rather than later.
They have both fiber to the node and fiber to the premise. I have FTTP. I saw them dig and run the line. I'm stuck on BPON and who knows when the hell they will upgrade.
GPON is going to be installed as new plant, meaning if there is existing BPON infrastructure, it won't be touched (until it has to be). I don't think they're doing anything to improve BPON until they max it out, however long that takes. As far as GPON, Austin, TX is AT&Ts first gigabit fiber network. Internet speeds to the house are 250 or 300mbps I believe, with an increase to 1gbps sometime this year. They haven't really released any more info on it, at least not to the lowly field techs (outside of Texas anyway)