Google Fiber is a relatively new, semi-experimental super-fast internet service provider that only a few cities in the U.S. have had the pleasure of experiencing so far, and other municipalities are bending over backwards to try to get Google's gigabit fiber internet. Now AT&T wants to play the same game with its fiber service, including in some of Google's prospective domain.

Playing Google's Game

Just like Google did earlier this year, AT&T has announced it's interested in expanding its "ultra-fast fiber network" to up to 100 possible municipalities across the country on Monday.

Just like with Google, AT&T has named Kansas City, Charlotte, Chapel Hill, Raleigh-Durham and areas surrounding those places as possible candidates (it previously announced it would compete with Google in Austin). Other areas that could get AT&T's GigaPower fiber include Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Oakland, Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego, San Jose... the list goes on and on.

AT&T is less specific about its requirements on local governments. "We're delivering advanced services that offer consumers and small businesses the ability to do more, faster, help communities create a new wave of innovation, and encourage economic development," said Lori Lee, senior executive vice president of AT&T Home Solutions, in the company's announcement. "We're interested in working with communities that appreciate the value of the most advanced technologies and are willing to encourage investment by offering solid investment cases and policies."

Not So Much Like Google

But for people in the vast expanse of possible candidates for GigaPower, this "expansion" isn't anything to get excited about. In AT&T's announcement, the company briefly mentioned "this expanded fiber build is not expected to impact AT&T's capital investment plans for 2014." It's likely not happening this year, and may not happen after that.

"The planned expanded availability of U-verse with GigaPower is part of AT&T's Project Velocity IP (VIP) investment plan to expand and enhance its wireless and wireline IP broadband networks to support growing customer demand for high-speed Internet access ... and AT&T continues to expect that its wired IP broadband network will reach 57 million customer locations in its 22-state wireline footprint by the end of 2015." This plan has been around since 2012, and as DSL Reports puts it (via Ars Technica): "What AT&T would have the press and public believe is that they're engaged in a massive new deployment of fiber to the home service. What's actually happening is that AT&T is upgrading a few high-end developments where fiber was already in the ground (these users were previously capped at DSL speeds) and pretending it's a serious expansion of fixed-line broadband."

Finally, unlike Google, AT&T's U-verse with GigaPower advertises that it reaches speeds up to 1 Gigabit per second, which Google Fiber actually delivers on, but the actual speed is closer to 300 Mbps. AT&T says it will get to 1 Gbps this year, but, as the Wall Street Journal's recent heavily-researched look at connection speeds shows, AT&T U-verse and internet services (DSL) has been between 8 to 20 percent slower than promised, on average. Netflix even said in its recent letter to shareholders that AT&T fiber was "slower than DSL from others."

For those who dream of gigabit internet but aren't in Google's small list of prospective cities, AT&T's fiber expansion might give you more hype than hope.

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