AT&T is laying new fiber optic cable in the nation's upper middle class-to-wealthy neighborhoods in a $4 billion-plus initiative it calls Project Lightspeed. It will use that fiber to deliver real fast Internet as well as its hot new U-verse IPTV service. In order to do that they have to install big cabinets--called fiber optic "nodes"--to serve up those services. The cabinets are five feet wide, four feet wide and more than two feet deep. They are painted beige.
AT&T is now proposing to bring the fiber into my neighborhood here in San Francisco. The AT&T people have been posting notices to prepare us for the coming of the beige boxes. This morning I ripped this notice off a telephone pole down by the bus stop. Here's a scan of the bottom half of it (the annotations are mine):
Click here to see the whole thing: View image
My neighborhood is comprised of tight rows of Victorian houses; it's quiet, cute and nice--a place where people spend thousands of dollars on the design of their hedges and entryways. Now this big beige AT&T box will be the first thing many of them see in the morning right after they bend down to pick up their New York Times. It may awaken that hair-trigger civic activism so common among us San Franciscans.
On the other hand, if you're an AT&T customer, the closer you live to one of these nodes, the faster and clearer your AT&T Internet and TV services will be. And now that AT&T is struggling to deliver more and better HD to keep up with the cable guys, they are planting these boxes in the middle of the block, not just on the corners, to get closer to more houses. Right now AT&T can deliver only one HD stream at a time into each customer household.
And there's something else. I don't want to overplay this (well, maybe a little bit), but it should be said that one of these cabinets suddenly blew up in a Houston neighborhood last year. Here's a picture of the ill-fated node obtained by the guys over at Light Reading.
AT&T still doesn't know (or isn't saying) why the thing blow'd up. If that were to happen again, especially in a crowded place like San Francisco, those nodes might suddenly become very unwelcome indeed. But one little explosion is no big deal, right? AT&T just needs to put a positive spin on it. Maybe make a new tagline out of it:
AT&T Project Lightspeed: We're big, we're beige, and we're dangerous.
