content: AT&T actually has been laying a lot of fiber for several years now with their U-verse service. Then they started making bold announcements. https://arstechnica.com/business/2014/04/att-copies-google-names-100-cities-where-it-could-offer-gigabit-fiber/ Part of their problem is while laying fiber they for their ISP services they also had to replace the cables going into their cell towers. A lot of them were still running on old T1 line bundles. Those were swapped out with simple Cat5 bundles giving massive bandwidth boosts. AT&T also has a lot of places where they literally just connected their ancient DSL lines from the early 2000s to the U-verse nodes as a stop gap. So I really hope they're eying those areas for fiber sooner than later. If AT&T doesn't screw anything up by the end of 2018 they'll actually be in a very good position. https://www.att.com/internet/gigapower.html