Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg )

AT&T today announced it will spin off WarnerMedia—including HBO and Warner Bros.—into a new company, less than three years after AT&T bought Time Warner Inc. for $108 billion.

AT&T said it struck a deal with Discovery, Inc. to combine WarnerMedia and Discovery's assets into a "standalone global entertainment company." AT&T would receive $43 billion in the all-stock transaction through "a combination of cash, debt securities, and WarnerMedia's retention of certain debt." AT&T shareholders would receive stock in 71 percent of the new media company, while Discovery shareholders would own the other 29 percent.

AT&T expects it to take a full year to complete the spinoff and combination with Discovery. "The transaction is anticipated to close in mid-2022, subject to approval by Discovery shareholders and customary closing conditions, including receipt of regulatory approvals," AT&T said.

Enlarge / Aaron Epstein after conducting a speed test on his new AT&T fiber service, in a picture taken by his wife, Anne. (credit: Anne Epstein)

When 90-year-old Aaron Epstein bought a Wall Street Journal print ad to complain about his slow AT&T Internet service, the impact was immediate. Reporters like me called him and wrote articles, talk of his plight went viral on the Internet, his ad made an appearance on Stephen Colbert's Late Show , TV networks interviewed him for nightly news broadcasts, and AT&T executives sprang into action to minimize the public-relations damage.

Now, barely a week later, Epstein's home in North Hollywood, California has AT&T fiber service with unlimited data and advertised speeds of 300Mbps in both directions. In a speed test yesterday, download speeds were 363Mbps and upload speeds were 376Mbps. It's a gigantic upgrade over the "up to" 3Mbps DSL he and his wife, Anne, struggled with before.

Normally, complaints about AT&T DSL don't lead to fiber-to-the-home upgrades the next week, as AT&T has essentially abandoned the old phone network in large parts of the country where AT&T has not deemed it profitable enough to install state-of-the-art technology. But it appears we have discovered what it takes to kick AT&T into its fastest fiber-installation mode, and the answer is a quarter-page Wall Street Journal print ad.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Pasieka )

Comcast's cable Internet still has a heavy emphasis on download speeds, as even its gigabit-download service only comes with 35Mbps uploads . But that may not be the case forever, as today Comcast announced a "technical milestone" that can deliver gigabit-plus download and upload speeds over existing cable wires.

Specifically, Comcast said it conducted "a trial delivering 1.25Gbps upload and download speeds over a live production network using Network Function Virtualization (NFV) combined with the latest DOCSIS Technology." Comcast installed the service at a home in Jacksonville, Florida, where "the technology team consistently measured speeds of 1.25 Gbps upload and 1.25Gbps download over the connection."

The speeds were delivered over a hybrid fiber-cable network, with the coaxial cable providing the final connection into the home. That's nothing new as Comcast has been using both fiber and cable for years, but Comcast said the trial benefitted from the company's "ongoing effort to extend fiber further into neighborhoods." Normally, symmetrical gigabit speeds require a fiber-to-the-home connection. But many more homes have cable than fiber, so a symmetrical gigabit technology could be deployed faster if it doesn't require bringing fiber all the way to each building.

Enlarge / A trio of Wi-Fi 6 Eero Pro devices like these should provide excellent Wi-Fi coverage and performance for nearly any home. (credit: Eero )

This Tuesday, Eero—one of the first and most popular Wi-Fi-mesh providers—announced a new hardware and software program which targets ISPs rather than retail customers. Ars spoke about the new program at length with Nick Weaver, Eero founder and CEO, and Mark Sieglock, Eero's GM of Software Services.

The short version of Eero for Service Providers is simple: deploy new Eero 6 series hardware, let your customers self-install using a co-branded app with the ISP's own name on it, and provide the ISP with Eero Insight, a dashboard allowing them to view metrics from the entire fleet-level down to individual households. The telemetry exposed to the ISP includes outages, speed-test data, client network topology, RF diagnostics, and more.

• 

  ISPs using Eero Insight can check for network outages using Eero telemetry, with configurable alert levels. [credit: Eero ]

Weaver told us that the vanilla Eero Insight dashboard itself wasn't the whole story, though. The metrics, charts, and graphs the dashboard exposes can also be accessed via API, allowing larger providers to seamlessly integrate the data into their own, existing dashboards.

Enlarge / An old television set. (credit: Getty Images | Jeffrey Coolidge)

A 400-resident village in Wales suffered 18 months of DSL Internet outages each morning until the culprit was identified as electrical interference from an old TV set.

The residents of Aberhosan mysteriously experienced the outages each morning at 7am. Openreach, a BT subsidiary that provides Internet service in the UK, replaced old cables in the village in an attempt to stop the outages.

"Unfortunately, this didn't resolve the problems and so they began sleuthing for electromagnetic interference with the aid of a spectrum analyzer," according to an article in ISPreview today. The article has a lengthy quote from Openreach engineer Michael Jones, who said, "Not being able to solve the fault for our customers left us feeling frustrated and downbeat, but we were determined to get to the bottom it." Jones explained what happened next: