AT&T had been considering several Bay Area cities where it can bring the service. Aside from Cupertino, the list included Mountain View, Campbell, San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco.
Currently, the gigabit-speed fiber service is offered in Forth Worth, Austin, and Dallas. Other places that AT&T are considering include Houston, San Antonio, cities in Florida, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
AT&T will begin working on its GigaPower fiber-optic-based home Internet service in Cupertino, California after getting a green light from the city. The city, which is Apple's hometown and near Google's Mountain View headquarters, will be the first among the cities in California to receive the 1 gigabit a second offering of the Dallas-based carrier.
A service that has 1 gigabit or 1,000 megabits per second enables a user to download the digital version of a movie within two minutes. According to AT&T, the introduction of the gigabit-speed fiber service is several months away. Two years ago, Google has started delivering its gigabit-speed fiber connections to the city of Kansas. While the search company has also added Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah to its service coverage, it doesn't seem to offer a similar service in California.
AT&T seems more than eager to enter the broadband competition with Google now that the company is bringing its gigabit-speed fiber service in the search company's home turf. Furthermore, the U.S. carrier wanted to know how the competition will turn out once its proposed $48.5 billion acquisition of DirectTV, a satellite carrier, becomes confirmed.
"AT&T's decision to launch and expand the GigaPower network goes well beyond our competitors' fiber plans," said senior VP Eric Boyer of AT&T's U-verse Internet service. "Wiring Cupertino is a no-brainer given our presence here and Silicon Valley being the hub for technology innovation."
The race to GigaPower Internet supremacy is on between AT&T and Google with the latter also expanding its services. Apart from the three cities where its service is already available, Google has lined up nine additional markets that will soon have the similar fiber service. These would include San Jose, California and the nearby areas such as Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and Mountain View. The list also includes AT&T serviced territories such as San Antonio and Atlanta.
The move to expand the fiber services by AT&T and Google has pushed cable-providing companies such as Time Warner Cable Inc. and Comcast Corp to come up with a faster Internet service. Comcast, which is the local cable provider in Cupertino, had already begun enhancing its speed of 305 megabits into 505 megabits a second last year in some of the available markets.
AT&T said that details such as timing, availability, and pricing for the GigaPower Internet service in Cupertino shall be disclosed soon.
