AT&T enters Durham (NC) market with high-speed Internet

AT&T’s high-speed fiber Internet service launches in new, uncharted -- at least for AT&T -- territory July 20: Durham (NC). Few details on price and availability were immediately available, but AT&T does not currently operate wired services in Durham, meaning a lot of behind-the-scenes effort was required to deploy entirely new infrastructure. “This was a little bit out of the norm for us,” admits Venessa Harrison, AT&T North Carolina president. “We don’t traditionally serve Durham.” That means designing and building the fiber network “literally from scratch” to make it happen.

The wireless industry has changed -- partly due to innovation and partly due to policy, she explains. “It used to be that everything was territory-based, based on geography,” she says. But, no longer. Now, AT&T has the resources to spread its technology more broadly. And it’s soliciting partnerships to make it happen, reaching out to developers to try to get more communities on board with the service, dubbed GigaPower.