I just got a flyer from AT&T in the mail. It seems that they now support gigabit speeds to my house. I'm currently using 12Mbit U-Verse DSL, so this would be a significant speedup.

The pricing plans they're offering me are:
$110/mo: gigabit network, free equipment / installation, 1 year commitment / price lockin
add $30/mo for unlimited voice calling, U.S. and Canada
subtract $30/mo to drop to 300Mbit/sec

Of course, it's AT&T, therefore they're being unnecessarily scuzzy about it.

Those prices above are for AT&T's "Premier Offer" which includes the AT&T privacy violation engine. It appears the alternative is to spend an extra $29/mo to get the "Standard Offer". You don't get the one-year lock-in, but you pay a $99 "installation fee" and a $7/mo "equipment fee". (More details at Ars Technica, among others.)

Clearly, they're pushing you to the privacy violation engine. The question is whether I really care with most of the world going to HTTPS and, I suppose, with the ability for me to just build a tunnel to my office and hide all of my traffic.

WOW!

The "WOW" is for the fact that they are so up front and clear about their "privacy violation engine".

I second that "WOW!"

So they're saying they're going to do man in the middle ad injections on your web traffic? Where would these ads be shown? Anywhere? A permanent banner ad on the top of all pages? Replacing existing advertising? I'm sure I'm not understanding this correctly.

I'd be worried about unintended security holes. But you're right, Dan. As long as we get the web to move toward HTTPS I guess we'll be alright.

HTTP happens. SMTP too. Visitors, mobile devices, lazy browsing practices, etc, can all generate unencrypted traffic.

The $30 fee reduction for 'downgrading' to 300 speed appears to nicely offset the $29 'privacy maintained' cost.

Another $7 for the modem rental, you get 300mbps speed and less worry about non-HTTPS traffic snooping.

In my region 300mbps is about as fast as it gets for most people (~300 down, 20 up).

It's hard for me to say, but I'm perfectly happy at the lowest Fios speeds of 25Mbps down/up. We're easily able to stream two HD Netflix videos, which is as much as we'd need right now.

Of course, if/when 4K becomes popular, we'll need to bump our speeds back up, but even then 50Mbps should do it for one (maybe two) stream(s).

I wouldn't turn down gigabit if it were offered, but at the moment I'm paying almost a third of what that gigabit service would cost.

And Dan, are you actually considering home phone service?

That is what I thought too, but I wonder how long it will be until they 'accidentally' mess up and have the 300mbps service 'accidentally' go through the IP scanning without the choice to opt out.

Unless you go with cable (Cox), the max speed in my neighborhood is 14mbps. My entire area right now is being wired for fiber (construction signs all over the place touting the fiber expansion and how long construction will last). I just haven't been able to figure out who is actually going to be using the fiber. It looks like the city is paying for it, but there is no other information available.

We presently have a POTS line. $30/month to keep a POTS line is quite reasonable, especially given cellular coverage is spotty in our house, and cellular voice quality is sketchy even on a good day. (Mumble grumble. T-Mobile WiFi calling not supported on the Nexus 5. Grumble mumble.)

There are times when it's nice to have an hour or two phone call and know the quality will be consistent the whole way along. POTS does that. Presumably, the VoIP hiding inside their $30 POTS service is going to be good. This is AT&T. 911 will work. Calls will connect every time. I trust AT&T to make telephony work.

It's the privacy violation engine that bugs me, alongside the remarkable cost of opting out of it. Yet this new service would be a massive speedup from my current 18Mbit down / 1.5Mbit up service, particularly the uplink speed, which I really beat on every time I add another gigabyte of photos to my computer and it wants to push my offsite backups.

Furthermore, the Home Theater Upgrade Plan Of Doom includes some sort of 4K television, and that means 4K video streaming, and *that* means I'll want more bandwidth.

At this point, the workaround solution that I'm pondering is setting up some sort of pfSense box connected to my university's VPN service. I have no idea if they're set up to handle the bandwidth, but maybe they *should* be.

I agree with this plan, if AT&T is your only viable option here. Their privacy invasion pricing just seems to be trading too much for too little in return. And it sets a bad precedent if this stands unchallenged, teaching people that they must give up privacy simply to gain beyond broadband speeds that have been common for years elsewhere.

Speeds around 100mbit and above (including matching upstream) have the ability to change one's internet usage similar to the jump from dialup to broadband. It is worth the jump if you can justify it.

Netflix loads nearly instantly, seeks nearly instantly, and is full quality right away. It's close to what it feels like using a DVR. I have a NAS that lets me access my data anywhere at LAN like speeds. I use a cloud backup solution that holds close to 5TB,and the initial upload in the first few weeks had no impact to anything else I was doing. Working from home allows me a nice office like network connection when using VPN. I remember not even giving it a second thought when I transitioned a multi gigabyte VM off my laptop to a VSphere instance. If I had the gigabit tier, odds are my PS4 could download a new game quicker then Amazon Prime Now could deliver a disc.

For myself, I'm on an ISP that offers 2 speeds, 100 or 1000mbit symmetrical. $60 or $80 a month. (and that's exactly $60, not $60 + tax1 + tax2 + tax3 + fee1 + fee2 like most other ISPs). The only thing they monitor is the traffic at their transit points, as an indicator of when upgrades will be needed. The network they run had 60gbit dedicated connection to Netflix a few years ago, it's grown since.

Even better, there is momentum building for Seattle to operate a publicly owned gigabit capable network. The studies done show that the buildout cost would be covered just fine with a ~$70 a month access charge. And this includes enough redundancy in the buildout to avoid some of the crippling outages both Comcast and Centurylink have had over the past year. I'm hoping to see this spread to more areas, as the FCC has quashed the laws the telecoms helped pass that blocked municipal networks in many areas.

AT&T has a strange idea of what fiber means. In my area, they run fiber to the neighborhood distribution boxes (one is literally 25' from my front door), but copper to the houses, so they max out at 12mbps (they say 14, but it's really 12). They refuse to run fiber to the house, even tho in my area it's all overhead drops, so super easy.



This, of course, is insane...

That's exactly what I have today. (Slightly faster, but same deal.) The new "GigaPower" service is fiber directly to your house.

Meanwhile, I ran into some Rice IT guys while getting lunch. I started asking about hooking up a VPN and all that, and they said "oh no, don't get AT&T GigaPower; it's not stable, my neighbor had no service over the weekend, etc.". They instead recommended a third-party commercial provider (PhonoScope) who apparently has right-of-way to string fiber on the poles behind my house and who probably has something to tap into in the big street a block away from my house. Hmm.

So... you are concerned that AT&T seeing what websites you visit and what search terms you use is an invasion of privacy, yet you have no qualms about 5TB of your personal data hanging out in a server someplace where you have no actual hands-on control over it?

There is a discontinuity of logic there, I think.

tanstaafl.

I can see why that disconnect would be seen without the details. I researched a number of cloud backup providers, and picked one that allows double encryption. Basically their stock offering encrypts everything across the wire, and then encrypts the data when it hits their disk. They can still get into the data if needed under this setup, and it enables certain other features of the service.

Under their double encryption option, the data is encrypted first on my computer with a key I provided that never crossed the wire. It still gets encrypted a second time when written to their disk and is protected across the wire. If someone really wants to spend the time to try and crack the key I provided as well as their key, then odds are I have far worse issues at that point to deal with. Using this option does limit some of the services they offer, but for my needs I don't mind. The goal was to have an offsite automated backup that is secure.