Jacksonville wins bid for broadband fiber network

A joint press conference with the Mayor of Jacksonville, Alvin Brown, and a spokesman for AT&T, is planned for tomorrow, Tuesday August 19, at 10:00 a.m. in Jacksonville City Hall, announcing that AT&T will be bringing its faster broadband fiber network to Jacksonville, making it one of 25 cities in the country to get the high-end service.

The ultra-fast U-verse service delivers broadband speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second to both consumer and business subscribers. Fiber-optic cable is made up of strands of optically pure glass as thin as a human hair that carry digital information at the speed of light over long distances.

According to a published report at the Jacksonville Business Journal, last week, AT&T said it was bringing U-verse with GigaPower to Miami, its first entree into Florida. That city is the fourth in which it is competing with Comcast Corp. for customers seeking higher speeds.

Mayor Brown has vocally campaigned for a high-speed, fiber-optic internet — such as U-verse or competitor Google Fiber — to come to Jacksonville, saying it could catapult the city to the next level of technological connectivity, which in turn would drive more business.