back to article Silicon Valley gets its first 1Gbps home bro– oh, there's a big catch

Silicon Valley, or rather a small patch of it, finally has gigabit home broadband – and it's not Google Fiber. And there are two catches. We often rag on AT&T for following Mountain View's advertising giant into markets, but in this case it seems the telco has beaten Google in its own backyard. The phone giant said it will …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    VPN

    If you live in Silicon Valley, there are probably multiple VPN providers nearby. For a little extra money you could route 100% of your home traffic through it, so AT&T will gather nothing.

    For bonus points, have a background process running that bypasses your VPN to do in-the-clear Google searches of pairs of random dictionary words and follows the links therein, to pollute both AT&T's and Google's data gathering machine.

    1. Number6

      Re: VPN

      I was going to make the same comment, with the additional note that if there isn't a suitable VPN provider, you can be sure that someone will start one.

      I like the data pollution idea, will see if I can implement it even without an AT&T connection. Perhaps someone could do an app for Verizon users and their unique cookies, too.

    2. petur
      Unhappy

      Re: VPN

      Erm... what's the point of having gigabit broadband if you're going to funnel it through VPN - unless you find an affordable VPN provider offering those speeds and volume?

      Sorry, VPN is not a usable solution, me thinks...

    3. FutureShock999

      Re: VPN

      Ummm...why?

      Let's look at it this way - AT&T has invested the money for GB fiber to the home, with a presumed ROI attached. Part of that ROI is knowing either they will make money selling targeted ads, or they will make money by having you opt out.

      Let's say enough people become untrackable, and it affects the targeting of the ads they are selling. Do you really think they are going to just sit back and allow themselves to miss their ROI target? What are you smoking?

      The fact is, if you play with their targeting, it will lower their advertising rates, leading to less income to pay off the investment, and they will simply have to generate that money some other way...likely by raising prices of both privacy and basic service.

      Now, about this plan of yours...where is the GOOD part? (And I know I will be downvoted...but honestly, did you think this through?)

      OH - you didn't think of that one, did you?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @FutureShock999

        Do you really think enough people will do this to affect the value proposition to AT&T? I'm suggesting something that only the technically inclined would consider, let alone implement. If half their customers did it, yeah it would be a tragedy of the commons and they'd be forced to do something about it. But that won't happen, even in Silicon Valley.

        The average person doesn't care about being tracked in exchange for saving money, otherwise Android would be a giant flop.

      2. Uncle Ron

        Re: VPN

        Monopoly ISP's like AT&T and nearly -every- cable TV system in America have a license to print money. Their monopoly franchise allows them to bilk consumers like almost no other enterprises in the history of history. Now, AT&T wants to further monetize (a word I hate) their monopoly by charging $29 per month MORE to keep your privacy! Unbelievable. Internet service is already THE most profitable product these monopolies sell--by far. Just look at their (obtuse, obscure) annual reports and you can see how profitable the mostly add-on IP service is.

        This has to stop. Nobody needs "Gigabit" service to the home--nobody. This is a pure marketing scam. Only small and medium businesses with 10's or hundreds of employees--terminals or cash registers or data dumping--need gigabit speed. Do the math: High definition video streaming requires from 4 to 6 MEGABITS per second, and gigabit speed would allow you to stream 150 to 250 HD movies simultaneously. Nobody needs that.

        I wish to god the press would stop hyping this stuff like something miraculous has come to Cupertino. Plus, at $110 per month, it represents a real consumer rip-off. STOP IT.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: VPN

          "High definition video streaming requires from 4 to 6 MEGABITS per second"

          An oft repeated but untrue statement. That is not nearly enough bandwidth for a good quality stream. The average BluRay disc has a 50Mbit or so video stream and another 1.5Mbit for audio.

          4 to 6 Mbits gives you very blocky so-called 'high res' video and very poor quality, heavily compressed audio. Standard def analogue tv had a more accurate pixel stream than this rubbish.

          If it's good enough for you then you must be one of those people who can't tell the difference between a 96Kbps MP3 and a FLAC encode.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: VPN

            So I guess you never watch cable or satellite if you can't stand such 'blocky' video? The ones with the highest quality are using about 6.5 Mb/sec on average for their 720p/1080i HD channels using MPEG4 compression, or 12 Mb/sec using MPEG2.

            You can't get Blu Ray quality HD streams from anywhere on the net, and never will. You won't even get 50 Mb/sec 4Kp60 streams, sorry. Better stick to your Blu Ray and hope 4K Blu Ray doesn't die on the vine from lack of interest!

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: VPN

              Oh, BluRay won't die on the vine from lack of interest. It won't die any time soon, because there is no other source of high quality HD video. Even with BluRay's repellent DRM it is still the preferred source medium of choice for every pirated rip/re-encode, and that is what most people are watching. Many people have no interest in this streaming nonsense until the quality drastically improves. Because quality DOES matter and 6Mbit doesn't cut it.

              And no I don't watch awful quality cable or satellite.

              "You can't get Blu Ray quality HD streams from anywhere on the net, and never will. "

              And that is why I, and many other people, don't watch streaming video services! Thank you for agreeing with me.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Nobody needs "Gigabit" service to the home

          1. High quality video requires a lot more than 1 MB/s transfer speeds. If you're willing to settle for low quality video, then sure, you can get by with a lot less. A Blu-Ray disc can contain over 50GB of data that gets parsed in 2 hours. That works out to a little over 7 MB/s. Sure, not all content uses that much data and sure, we could compress it down to 650 MB, but then we're back in the VCD age.

          2. 10 years ago, you'd be the fool screaming that no one needs megabit download speeds or 20 years ago, telling us that 640k should be enough for anyone. Just because you can't see a use for it today doesn't mean there isn't one or won't be one soon. I certainly expect video quality (and correspondingly, size) to continue to go up for the foreseeable future. And lots of applications are never really considered until you have the tools to make them happen.

        3. This post has been deleted by its author

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: VPN

        The price is a ripoff as it is. In Hungary you can get a gigabit line for under 30-40$ a month. I know that in the US the wages are much higher but still looks expensive.

    4. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    So $139 or more to get gigabit internet + privacy (from AT&T)

    Seems extremely pricey, especially if that is their bundled price with VoIP phone and cable TV service.

  3. ben edwards

    Close, but no cigar

    Going to Cupertino sounds like they want the business customers first, but any business worth its salt won't just replace existing infrastructure just for AT&T's benefit. You target the home users so they harass IT enough to do it, cuz otherwise people will just torrent at work on someone else's dime.

  4. Jamie Jones Silver badge
    WTF?

    Cupertino is the real name?

    I always thought it was an El-Reg pun

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Cupertino is the real name

      ... and it's pronounced Cooper-tino.

  5. Ian Michael Gumby

    Meh...

    You talk about losing privacy with AT&T. But guess what.

    Google doesn't give you the option to get your privacy back.

    But then again, unlike AT&T, every major website runs Google's code that tracks you.

    I wonder why El Reg and other journalists don't look at how Google uses Google analytics and how they force companies in to using them for their analytics.

    Just saying!!!

    PS. Yeah I know about no script.

  6. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

    *** ...speeds may vary and are not guaranteed...

    I've heard that disclaimer before. I wonder if this is a real internet service or just a faster connection to an AT&T portal. Details are elusive for this service. A real 1Gbps connection would mean being able to host your own public content, streaming HD video without all its details stripped away, sharing NAS storage between family for backups, and never again needing to screw around with online document stores and thumb drives for personal storage. There are so many amazing things that could be done with a real 1Gbps internet connection and they just don't fit with AT&T's model of screwing the customer as much as possible.

  7. hodma727
    WTF?

    Really?

    Quite suprising, we have gigabit home broadband here in Dunedin, New Zealand, a town of about 120,000 and home to Otago University (contractors are now only one block away from my place :-)). I would have thought it would be ubiquitous in Silicon Valley!

  8. mIRCat

    Just what the doctor ordered.

    More money and less privacy, where can I sign up?

  9. MartinB105

    AdBlock makes this a solved problem

    So they gather data to serve ads, which then get blocked by AdBlock, thus having an end effect of doing precisely nothing? I'd be fine with that.

  10. Christian Berger

    The question is the upstream bandwidth

    1GBit/s is rather pointless if your upstream is rather low. The upstream is what counts.

    The typical example is watching TV over the Internet. If you only have 10 MBit/s you are not going to be able to provide more than a single SD channel over it.

  11. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    "Now, about this plan of yours...where is the GOOD part? (And I know I will be downvoted...but honestly, did you think this through?)"

    First, your premise is flawed. AT&T are greedy bastards, and already will be making a profit at the lower price, with 0 ads. The ads are just ADDITIONAL profits, not money they are counting on to operate the service. The $29 (or $44, or whatever) fee is just additional money they are charging because they can. If they get no ads served, they will not raise the price. They are charging monopoly pricing for gigabit service, see all these other markets where Google is already there, and AT&T's pricing is magically much lower than it is in Silicon Valley.*

    Second, I don't want any ISP (or anyone else) sniffing my traffic; this is greasy at best. And injecting content into websites AT&T does not operate should be (and possibly is) flat-out illegal. If AT&T wants to put ads wherever, they should deal with ad brokers like everyone else.

    *I'm waiting for ANY decent service here... CenturyLink (DSL provider, who does not allow 3rd party DSL on their system) and Mediacom (cable company) effectively run a duopoly here, with pricing so high that the usual "expensive last resort" of satellite internet is actually price competitive with their offerings.

  12. Passant Elsayed

    I`m using a very good VPN service with 6 connections at the same time with a big list of servers from different places in he world to brows the internet freely without proxy

    https://www.vpnanswers.com/top-vpn-providers-2016/

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