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Apple's home town to get blazing fast internet, 20 times faster than current AT&T service

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By Noel Young | Correspondent

August 20, 2014 | 4 min read

The 60,000 people of Apple’s hometown - Cupertino in Califormia are about to get one of the fastest internet services on the planet.

The Apple Campus

AT&T has announced it will bring super-fast broadband service, dubbed GigaPower, to Cupertino, possibly as soon as December.

It promises download speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second - fast enough to download a high-definition movie in half a minute . It is 100 times faster than the connection in the average American home and is 20 times faster than AT&T’s current offering.

Cupertino will be the first city west of the Rockies to get the service,the San Jose Mercury News reported.

AT&T’s upgrade in Cupertino follows Google's decision to reject the city's bid for Google's rival fiber service.

"We're really, really excited," said Mayor Gilbert Wong. "The council made it a priority to bring fast, reliable Internet to the city."

AT&T hopes to offer the service to Cupertino residents as early as December, or early next year, Ken McNeeley, president of AT&T's California operations, said .

The company hopes to to roll out service to other Bay Area cities early in 2015 and to San Jose in the first half of next year, he said.

Apart from Cupertino AT&T ‘s expansion of super-fast Internet services will cover as many as 100 municipalities in 25 metropolitan areas.

But those time lines aren't firm and are dependent in part on how long it takes to go through the permitting process in each city, McNeeley said.

AT&T spokesman Alex Carey said the company wasn't comfortable with announcing firm dates for the rollout.

Prices have not yet been set. . But in Austin,Texas, AT&T charges $70 a month for gigabit Internet access alone and $150 for a "triple play" package that includes phone services and a pay TV service with 200 channels.

AT&T's GigaPower service runs over fiber optic cables going straight into consumers' homes. It's similar to Google's Fiber service and is a huge leap from AT&T's existing high-speed U-verse service.

Currently, the fastest speed Bay Area residents can typically get through U-verse is 45 megabits per second, or about one-twentieth the speed of GigaPower.

Comcast, currently the main Internet access provider in the Bay Area, offers speeds of up to 150 megabits per second to residences, though it offers faster service to businesses.

Gigabit speeds would be a big jump from Comcast's current offerings. Gigabit service would provide much faster downloads and quicker Internet access to more people and devices within particular households.

To date, only a handful of cities in the United States have access to gigabit Internet service. Google offers Google Fiber in the Kansas City area and is considering bringing it to the Bay Area but has not said when. AT&T offers GigaPower in Austin and Dallas. And Chattanooga, Tennessee, offers gigabit service through its own city-controlled broadband network.

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