According to a CNet article, BellSouth plans to provide higher capacity broadband to most of its customer base in the next five years.
Video is driving the plans. The cable companies have not only captured about 75% of the broadband market, compared to the phone companies' paltry 15%, but the cable companies can offer the fabled triple play--voice, data, and video.
The phone companies are terrified. VoIP is sapping traditional landline customers all over the country, and most of those VoIP users are getting that service over cable broadband, not DSL broadband. So the telephone companies want to offer the same thing--voice, data, and video--but their weak point is the 100 year old design of the telephone infrastructure. Most phone users in this country are still getting their dial tone the way Alexander Graham Bell designed it, but those copper cables won't haul video all the way from phone company video head ends. So BellSouth has decided to go with fiber to the node (i.e. fiber to the neighborhood), and deliver the first mile (last mile) connection over copper.
This may sound like great news, but most communities are still stuck with the same two monopoly service providers they had twenty years ago; that's not choice, and two oligarchies aren't likely to drive prices down. Continuing to overbuild private networks does not level the playing field and will not attract real competition.