cork1958 I can’t say I’m totally surprised, but it really sounds like he was just saying whatever it takes to keep the customer happy until he realized you can tell what he’s saying can’t be true.
I believe EY2027 is still their goal to complete the project nationally. If they are able to throw more people and hardware at it to speed up these midwest markets, I’ll believe it’s achievable. But at this pace, I would be more inclined to expect it to spill into 2028.
At this point, I believe they’re done with phase 1 and everything going forward will be built with the phase 2 or 3 design. What’s unclear to me is where that P2/P3 demarcation is going to be. If you or I did actually get high split this year, would it be P2? Because that’s what I believe they’ve been doing up through last year. Or is the delay because they’d rather wait for vendors and resources to catch up, and finish the rest of the footprint as P3 going forward?
In my view, they probably chose to start in places like STL where Google Fiber has a presence, the New England markets where FiOS is available, and Texas where AT&T Fiber has been available for a decade because those were viewed as already-competitive markets. But between AT&T Fiber expanding in the former Ameritech region, the combined T-Mobile Fiber/Lumos/Metronet building out rapidly in dozens of cities, Omni Fiber in OH and TX, and the numerous other telcos and overbuilders making inroads, they’re now playing catch up in areas that were never competitive before.
I’m starting to question if they are leaning toward all phase 3 going forward now that they see how quickly fiber, FWA, and Starlink have started encroaching in their monopoly territories, like OH, MN, and WI; where up until recently, DSL was the only competition, if there was any at all. Building more areas to phase 3 would open the door to doing that selective FTTH, or as I call it “fiber-from-the-node,” that they’ve alluded to with the R-MACPHY hardware, which would enable them to offer more than 1 Gbps upload speeds to businesses, something that fiber providers who have deployed XGS-PON can already do today. So my guess is that areas with overhead utilities, and particularly business/commercial/retail streets will get that first, since that’s who will likely pay the exorbitant costs that they’ll surely charge for 2×2 Gig business internet. I don’t envision residential, especially with buried utilities, ever getting that offering unless the competitive situation becomes dire.