[pasbesoin]

AT&T recently announced some initial "Gigabit" deploys in the Chicagoland suburbs. I guess now we know why.

AT&T has been horrible in Illinois, with years and years of dragging their feet as well as reneging on commitments made to the State in return for e.g. tax breaks and rights of way.

Even with their announced Gigabit service, one really faces roughly twice the cost of Google Fiber if one chooses to opt out of AT&T's connection/data spying. And they impose a 1 TB / billing cycle (month) data cap. At the supposed 1 Gbps maximum speed, that's a bit less than 154 minutes of data -- less than 2.5 hours. For the entire month / billing cycle.

It's not difficult to imagine a 4K household easily exceeding this cap, or even a 1080p household with several users.

So... Go, Google Fiber. I don't hold out much hope they'll get out to me, but I'm glad that they may finally be holding incumbents' feet to the fire in a large urban market -- one that is considered AT&T's "home turf", to boot. (The erstwhile SBC headquarters were/are in the Chicago suburbs, and a lot of corporate management/leadership is or has been in the area.)