AT&T is signaling that it has plans to aggressively expand its 1Gbps Internet service offering. Following an announcement earlier this month that it was in talks to bring its 1Gbps Internet service to North Carolina, AT&T announced on Monday that it’s in talks to bring 1Gbps Internet service to 21 new major metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and San Francisco.
However, just because AT&T is announcing prospective plans to bring 1Gbps service to multiple cities, that doesn’t mean you should expect construction to begin anytime soon. AT&T says that this new initiative “is not expected to impact AT&T’s capital investment plans for 2014,” which means that there’s still a lot of work to do before we’ll actually know whether these communities will actually get access to super-fast Internet service.
But while discussions are very early at this point and there’s no guarantee that AT&T will actually bring service to these areas, this is nonetheless an encouraging development, particularly at a time when cable companies such as Time Warner Cable have continued insisting that people really don’t want 1Gbps speeds. Google said earlier this year that it’s considering expanding its Google Fiber network to 9 new cities, so it looks like AT&T is working to make sure that Google doesn’t hog the limelight when it comes to potential plans for expanding 1Gbps Internet service.
