The newest kid on the block offering digital services to central Kentucky is At&t Uverse. Currently they are offering fiber optic highspeed internet, voice over ip and television service coming down the pike. The fiber optic line they are offering is a little deceptive because the fiber optic is piped to the big rectangular boxes called crossovers in your neighborhood. Then piped from the crossover boxes to the small boxes near your house and into your house is still twisted pair copper wire. With the current technology that they are offering they can only pump out 12mb per second. But they are not like cable companies which are delivering 50 mb per second, their 12 mb will be the same no matter how many people are on the line. That is where they are different than cable, cable will offer 50 mb but at peak hours your at the mercy of how many people are on the same main line as you. So if your neighborhood has 50 people on the main line and at peak hours all 50 are using the service you will experience a drop in performance. At&t will be only limited to the equipment they install in your area which is nodes at the switching station. The modems that they send have a bridging feature where they setup so that they just act as a gateway to the internet and the customer can use their own wired or wireless network. This is an important feature because this allows the customers network to be used without interruption for home networking like file sharing, music sharing within the home or business.
As with all new technology At&t has seen their share of growing pains, they have had area outages that blanket large areas of the United States. The internet is riddled with unhappy Uverse customers complaining about the modems and the constant outages. If history prevails At&t will deliver a constant service but they are slow at sharing the bandwidth to their customers. So expectations for 24 mb per second in most central Kentucky areas will be years down the road.
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