AT&T announced Monday that the “GigaPower” Internet service is now available to residential and small business customers in parts of Jacksonville.
The announcement comes over a year after AT&T U-verse officials said they were preparing for the high-speed Internet service in Jacksonville.
“Launching [Monday] is just one more milestone on the path to providing Jacksonville area consumers and small businesses access to life in the blazing fast lane,” said AT&T Florida President Joe York in a prepared statement. “We are excited about keeping up that pace as we expand and enhance the AT&T GigaPower network to more locations.”
The communications company said it also plans to provide the same service to areas of St. Augustine in early 2016.
The speed of the service pushes Internet access to 1 gigabit, or 1,000 megabits, much faster than average service offered by most Internet providers.
For instance, what normally takes about one minute to download a music song file, now takes one second to download up to 25 song files under the gigabit service.
AT&T’s announcement comes amid a flurry of activity by Internet service providers in recent days and months. Wednesday, Google Fiber officials announced they were in negotiations with the city of Jacksonville to establish a new fiber-optic network to possibly provide its gigabit service to the Jacksonville area.
But no permits have even been granted by the city thus far to begin work on what promises to be a massive project.
Comcast instituted 2 Gigabit Pro in July and that transfers data up to about 2,000 megabits per second.
In fact, the Comcast service is already available for about 1.3 million Florida customers in the Comcast markets of Jacksonville, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
The AT&T GigaPower service costs about $110 per month.
©2015 The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, Fla.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
