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Telecommunications giant AT&T has announced the launch of U-verse with GigaPower, its all-fiber Internet network, for the city of Austin, Texas.
The company is offering two U-verse with GigaPower Internet packages: Standard and Premier. The Standard package offers Internet speeds of up to 300M bps for $99 per month.
Or you could pay only $70 per month for the Premier package. That package, which also offers Internet speeds of up to 300M bps, includes a waiver of equipment, installation and activation fees. The catch is that customers must participate in AT&T Internet Preferences, a program the company says “may use your Web browsing information, like the search terms you enter and the Web pages you visit, to provide you relevant offers and ads tailored to your interests.”
Customers who also select U-verse TV will receive free HBO, HBO Go for 36 months and HD service for $120 per month with qualifying TV services.
The offering will also give Austin residents the ability to schedule DVR recordings and watch both live and video on-demand TV shows on more than 30 different smartphones and tablets, as well as the ability to watch and record five shows at the same time.
“Our all-fiber network enables U-verse with GigaPower to give Austinites the fastest speeds available to consumers in the city,” Dahna Hull, AT&T’s vice president and general manager for Austin, said in a statement. “With U-verse with GigaPower, our customers can download movies and music and navigate, post and interact on the web faster than ever before, and have one of the best TV experiences around. It’s reliable, crazy fast and priced to attract more and more people to give us a try.”
Customers who sign up for the 300M-bps service will be upgraded to speeds of up to 1 Gigabit per second when available in 2014, at no extra cost. In addition, U-verse with GigaPower customers who are also AT&T wireless customers will receive 50GB of free cloud storage.
AT&T plans to expand the availability of U-verse with GigaPower beyond parts of Austin-area neighborhoods such as French Place, Mueller, Zilker and Onion Creek to even more residents and small businesses in 2014.
When announcing plans in October to roll out U-verse with GigaPower to consumers and small businesses, AT&T said it would collaborate with Austin leaders to discuss how the new all-fiber platform could further the citywide technology ecosystem and build on the progressive nature of the community.
In the coming weeks, the company will share plans of an initiative to drive new innovation and solve everyday challenges, connecting Austin in new ways based on community input.
Earlier this year, Google officially announced that the tech-friendly, progressive city would be the second U.S. city to get the company’s superfast Gigabit Internet service starting in 2014. The timeline calls for Google to start connecting homes in Austin by mid-2014, and Google also plans to connect many public institutions to the system as it is built in Austin, including schools, hospitals, community centers and more, at no charge.