AT&T U-verse Spins Up Business Fiber

AT&T U-verse has begun to ramp up the deployment of a fiber-based service for business customers in select markets that will start off delivering up to 300 Mbps, but will eventually be ratcheted up to 1 Gbps.

The AT&T Business Fiber offering, targeted to multi-tenant commercial buildings, comes out of the telco’s Project Velocity IP upgrade project.

Early on, the new fiber-based service is being offered to more than 16,000 businesses located in “AT&T Fiber Ready Buildings” in Austin and San Antonio, Texas; Detroit; Indianapolis; Sacramento, Calif.; and Orlando, Fla.  Other markets will be announced later this year, the telco said.

Tiers for AT&T’s fiber-fed service for business starts at 25 Mbps (downstream) for $50 per month.  AT&T is introducing the service as it faces stiffer competition from Comcast, Cox Communications and other cable operators that are targeting small- and mid-sized businesses with fiber-based Ethernet services.

The new business-focused effort also enters the fray as AT&T starts to roll out a targeted, residential fiber-based “GigaPower” service in markets such as Austin and Dallas/Ft. Worth, with several others in the works.