AT&T is making the rounds in rural Kentucky, not too far from where I live, and is announcing the introduction of their residential wireless broadband product that is the result of the FCC’s CAF II program. Today I’m looking at more detail at that product.

AT&T was required under the CAF II rules to deliver broadband speeds of at least 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload. AT&T says Kentucky announcement that they will be delivering products with at least that much speed, so it’s possible that customers might see something a little faster. Or the company could cap speeds at 10 Mbps and we’ll have to wait for reports from customers about actual speeds.

AT&T accepted nearly $186 million in FCC funds to bring CAF II broadband capabilities to 84,333 households in the state, or $2,203 per household. They say all of those homes will have the broadband available by the end of 2020 (although there is no penalty if some of the homes don’t get covered – which one would expect since many homes are likely to be too far from a cell tower).

AT&T will be delivering the broadband in Kentucky using LTE broadband from cellphone towers. This is delivered to homes by placing a small antenna box (not a dish) on the exterior of a home. They say that they will be using a different set of frequencies for CAF II broadband than what is used for cellular service, meaning there should be no degradation of normal cellular service.

I saw a news article in Kentucky that says the price will be $50 per month, but that’s a special one-year price offer for customers also willing to sign up for DirecTV. Following are more specific details of the normal product and pricing:

• Customers can get a price of $60 per month for 1-year by signing a 12-month contract. After the year the price increases to $70 per month and is set at $70 per month for those not willing to agree to a contract.
• Customers signing a contract see no installation charge, but otherwise there is a $99 one-time fee to connect.
• There is an early termination charge for customers that break the one-year contract of $10 for each remaining month of the contract.
• There is a $150 fee for customers who don’t return the antenna box.
• There is a monthly data cap of 170 Gigabytes of downloaded data. Customers pay $10 for each additional 50 GB of download up to a maximum of $200 per month. AT&T is offering a 340 GB monthly data cap right now for customers who bundle with DirecTV – but that’s a temporary offer until October 1.
• AT&T also will layer on a monthly $1.99 administrative fee that they pocket.

I think the pricing is far too high considering that the $186 million given to AT&T probably paid for all, or nearly all of the cost of the upgrades needed to deliver the service. Some of that money probably was used to bolster fiber to rural cell sites and the funding would have been used to add the new electronics to cell sites. AT&T used free federal money to create a $72 monthly broadband product, and before even considering the data cap is a product with a huge margin return since AT&T doesn’t have to recover the cost of the underlying network.

The small data cap is going to generate a lot of additional revenue for AT&T. The monthly data cap of 170 GB is already too small. Comcast just reported in June that the average download for all of their 23 million broadband customers was 151 GB per month. That means there are already a significant number of homes that want to use more than AT&T’s monthly 170 GB cap. We know that monthly home demand for broadband keeps growing and the Comcast average just a year ago was 128 GB per month. With that growth, within a year the average customer will want more than AT&T’s cap.

A few years ago when I was on Comcast they measured my 3-person home as using nearly 700 GB per month. On the AT&T plan my monthly bill would be $180 per month. Within a few years most homes will want to use more data than AT&T’s cap. The FCC really screwed the public when they didn’t insist that carriers taking the funding should provide unlimited downloads, or at least some high data cap like 1 terabyte. That stingy data cap gives AT&T permission to print money in rural America.

The 10 Mbps speed is also a big problem. That speed today is already inadequate for most households who now want to engage in multiple simultaneous streams. I’ve written many times about the huge inefficiencies in home WiFi and a 10 Mbps connection is just barely adequate for two video streams as long as there are no other broadband uses in the home at the same time. A typical home with kids these days is going to want to simultaneously watch video, do homework, play games, browse the web, download files or work from home. A home with a 10 Mbps speed is not close to equivalent to much faster urban broadband connections. You don’t have to look forward more than a few years to know that a 10 Mbps data caps is soon going to feel glacially slow.

Finally, cellular data has a higher latency than landline broadband, with latency as high as 100 msec. Customers might have problems at times on this product maintaining video streams, making VoIP calls or staying connected to a school or work server.

I’m sure that a home that has never had broadband is going to welcome this product. But it’s not going to take them long to realize that this is not the same broadband available to most homes. They are also going to realize that it’s possibly the last speed upgrade they are going to see for a long time since AT&T and the FCC want to check off these homes as now having broadband.