AT&T beefed up a lot of its copper DSL network by hybridizing it with fiber lines. Fiber-optic delivers service over microscopic glass strands as pulses of light, and using this tech to carry data over long distances improves your speeds even if the data slows over the copper DSL lines that connects your house to the network.
If you live in a hybrid-DSL area, you can get speeds up to 100 Mbps on your AT&T internet plan. But in rural areas that are further from the fiber network, your internet might be as slow as 768 Kbps (0.768 Mbps). Yikes.
But AT&T’s fiber-optic network keeps expanding, and in 65 metropolitan areas, AT&T now offers speeds as high as 5 Gbps (5,000 Mbps)—that’s over 6,000 times faster than AT&T’s slowest DSL speed.
If you’re a real speed fiend, you should know that the 5 Gig Internet plan can only get up to 4.7 Gbps on any one wired device. But most of us use the internet on more than one device at a time (we know you scroll through Instagram while watching Netflix). So it’s likely you’re already spreading that bandwidth love between your devices, and the 4.7 Gbps shortcoming shouldn’t be a dealbreaker.