Thanks AT&T - For Nothing

If you are lucky enough to live in an area that gets your local phone service from AT&T you will understand my pain.

I live in the country, barely.  I am just outside of my local towns city limits and am of course outside of AT&T's DSL range.  I will not even go into the thousands of people INSIDE the city limits that are also outside of AT&T's DSL range.  AT&T sets the cable path distance from their central office at 15000 feet (without a remote terminal to extend the length), this is not limited by the technology, but by AT&T.

In my little area of America we also have numerous small phone companies that server various area around mine.  Just to the west we have the old Embarq which is now CenturyLink, they offer DSL in a lot of small towns around mine and their limits are vastly farther than AT&T and they also are pretty good at installing remote terminals to extend their reach as necessary.

You would think that AT&T being the big monster they are would have DSL access to all of their customers by now, especially since they primarily do business in areas where a lot of people live, but you would be wrong.  In my area ALL of the smaller and even COOP phone companies have much better high speed propagation than AT&T does in theirs.

So that leads to the question of why.  Is it the money, nope, if the smaller pockets of the little phone companies can afford to expand to its smaller customer base then AT&T sure should.  Plus isn't there money available to expand broadband to rural areas, yep.

Nor is the problem the technology, the manpower, or any other excuse.  The problem is that AT&T does not want to share and that they don't care.  You see if AT&T expands its DSL footprint they have to allow other ISPs to wholesale the access to the customers, and they don't want to.

Before you believe some of the statements going around that they are losing money on these wholesale accounts I will state that my company is one of these wholesalers and the price that we get charged is much more for the access to the customer (not including direct Internet access, mail servers, tech support, etc that we also have to have to give the customers a complete service) than AT&T sells its Internet service for directly to its customers.

I am tired of the delays, false promises, and excuses.  It is high time that someone at the FCC takes a hard look at AT&T and persuades them to expand as they have been promising since the early 2000's.

Every other phone company around is expanding its footprints and offerings, there is money and benefits in doing so.

I would also like to say "Good Job" to CenturyLink, who ever thought that I would have to live farther in the country in order to get High Speed Internet.