Why Fiber in the new communities but not the ones that have been here?

Unfortunately internet service is still regulated as a luxury, with some limited government assistance. Never mind fiber being the top end, but not everyone can get certified broadband in the country. That minimum is 25Mbps.

I say the baseline needs to be brought up, kept consistent with symmetrical speeds (upload and download), and reach more of the country. We do not need 2Gbps (yet). At this point before people trying to leap into the future with their ever controlling 'smart' homes, 100Mbps to 300Mbps would be a reasonable baseline at this point.

WiFi everything would be horrible. Too much in the wireless spectrum, distance concerns, on top of existing interference. Wired is still the most reliable. Sure have WiFi mixed in for convenience, but use that for devices that are mobile and keep those that are static wired.

There is not direct line between you and the entire internet. You are not the only car on the road. Cable is know for being a bit more problematic on this as some areas added too many people that could reasonably use the infrastructure, where others the area and usage has grown faster than the infrastructure itself.

AT&T is still expanding fiber. It is hoped they will announce another multi-year plan and not count it finished with the current one. Even with that, they don't give the specific rollout plans. So there is never any guarantee you will get fiber. Either you wait until some unknown time it is available, go with whatever better internet is in your area, or at extreme move to where better internet already exists.

The country being fully connected and integrated at super speeds is still a Science Fiction dream. One that is slowly being worked towards. Unfortunately it comes sooner to some than others.

And if nobody cared about cable TV anymore it wouldn't still be a big business. You may not care, but certainly do not speak for the millions who still use it. Also this is a public forum of other customers, so we didn't add equipment to anybody.

I say the baseline needs to be brought up, kept consistent with symmetrical speeds (upload and download), and reach more of the country. We do not need 2Gbps (yet). At this point before people trying to leap into the future with their ever controlling 'smart' homes, 100Mbps to 300Mbps would be a reasonable baseline at this point.

I pretty much agree with everything else Juniper said above, just not this paragraph.  25 Mbps is fine for most users unless they want to stream 4K or better content.  It's a reasonable baseband baseline.  Smart homes don't really need much bandwidth to be smart homes unless they have a lot of video monitoring (which goes to the upload). 

If your home wasn't at least planned out and the land prepared so that they could run fiber for your home when they constructed the fiber for your neighborhood, it wasn't accounted for.  There isn't fiber buried for you, there isn't splitter capacity designated for you.  When a new apartment complex is built, or a new subdivision is built.  Neither AT&T nor Comcast bears all of the cost for the construction; the builder has to pay much of it. 

Wow that’s a lot of drama.  🎭 

How we get access won’t matter in the long run as both major company classes are rolling out symmetrical end user internet.  And only they know when a given address is in the plan.  These companies answer to shareholders and there’s one thing you can be sure of is you’ll have the privilege of an increased bill unless there’s legitimate competition.   
And about this business of shared bandwidth, everyone’s connection is eventually aggregated upstream, and that old argument against cable is likely just that, old.  

Fiber is not regulated. It costs money to install fiber and AT&T is, like any other business, in the business of making money.

That means, like any other company, they will cherry-pick where to install fiber (e.g., apts, new developments, easy installs, etc.).

The existing communities are generally harder to install and therefore are at the bottom of the list.

That is, unfortunately the state of affairs. Without regulation, there is no incentive for them to do otherwise.

I feel the pain as I am in the same situation. AT&T has basially abandoned the area in terms of fiber. As a result, a competitor is moving in (2-5 years) and AT&T will not therefore cover the same area.

Over time (e.g., 5 years), AT&T will lose their business in areas such as mine as the competitor's fiber pushes out the service to copper customers.

And about this business of shared bandwidth, everyone’s connection is eventually aggregated upstream,

While this is true, I would mention two caveats:

The bigger the resource being shared, the better the chance of some of it being available.  When there's only 1 Gbps on the coax for everyone, everyone on that segment shares the 1 Gbps.  With XGS-PON, there's 10 times that available, for a similar number of homes. 

The shared bus medium of coax deployment means (to a much greater degree) anyone can cause a problem to anyone else on the same "coax" tree.  Disconnect your cable without terminating it, introduce reflection that everyone sees.  That sort of thing isn't nearly the problem with fiber (although a misbehaving ONT could theoretically cause similar issues).

@JefferMC 

Fair enough. Even I went over for a baseline as I was thinking when one has more than one device which each sharing that bandwidth fighting each other for it.

But still the OP demanding that fiber and 2Gbps be the baseline seems far out of touch with the actual internet needs of the country. A more stable internet that brings up the baseline is needed for the nationwide infrastructure, but demanding multi-Gbps speed is like demanding that every driver needs a flying car.