AT&T to expand its 1Gbps GigaPower service to 38 more cities including LA, San Francisco, Birmingham, Pensacola, Reno, Memphis, Charleston, Detroit, Tulsa
AT&T GigaPower fiber expanding to 38 more cities — AT&T announced Monday it will expand its 1Gbps GigaPower fiber optic broadband service …
Context & Ripple Effects
AT&T's GigaPower expansion lands one year after Google Fiber put Atlanta, Nashville and North Carolina on its map — the move that turned gigabit fiber from an Austin/Kansas City curiosity into a national land-grab. AT&T is answering by scaling its own 1Gbps footprint from a handful of metros to 38 more cities at once.
The timing also sets up a head-to-head with cable: Detroit appears on both AT&T's new list and in Comcast's gigabit cable launch plan for Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago, Detroit and Miami, meaning the same cities are about to get competing gigabit pitches over fiber and coax within months of each other.
First-order effects
- Residents and businesses in the 38 named cities — including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Memphis and Tulsa — gain a 1Gbps fiber option where most previously had sub-gigabit tiers, forcing local pricing and speed comparisons immediately.
- In overlapping markets like Detroit, AT&T's fiber arrival directly precedes Comcast's gigabit cable launch, giving consumers a rare same-year choice between two gigabit technologies.
Second-order effects
- Comcast's DOCSIS-based gigabit rollout becomes a defensive counter rather than a first move — cable can match the headline speed without trenching fiber, pressuring AT&T to compete on price, bundles and installation speed instead.
- Google Fiber's expansion calculus shifts: entering a metro now means facing an incumbent that pre-announced gigabit coverage across dozens of cities, raising the cost of winning subscribers on speed alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, gigabit stops being a differentiator and becomes table stakes — AT&T's own trajectory points there, from this 1Gbps rollout through its power-line-guided radio trials to its later claim of 20 Gbps speeds on a production fiber network.
- City-by-city competitive announcements become the industry's planning unit: broadband investment increasingly follows where a rival has planted a flag rather than where standalone demand justifies builds.
The trend: US broadband is consolidating around a gigabit-speed arms race, with incumbent carriers matching Google Fiber's expansion market-by-market and pushing toward multi-gigabit tiers.