There are two other things to consider:
1) The AT&T Mobility trademark is owned by Cingular. That's right, when you walk into a store with the AT&T globe that sells cellphones, you're walking into a store owned by Cingular. AT&T makes the same "profit" from those stores if they sell a million phones a day or if they lock their doors - a payment for the use of the trademark. And that happened before smartphones did. (The LOCKED Motorola V551 that works with my AT&T SIM originally came with a Cingular SIM. When I brought it into "AT&T" and asked for a temporary equipment swap while waiting for a replacement phone, he saw the Cingular logo on the phone. I asked him if he remembered. [I didn't specify what.] He said, "Yes, we're still the same guys. It'll take a blue and orange SIM too.")
2) Assuming that they ran 10GBps fiber right to your modem (and you had a modem that could handle that speed) and no router to slow things down. (And assume that your computer can handle 10GB[that's bytes]ps data transfer on its Ethernet connection.) You request something from Wikipedia. Your request is traveling over much slower backbone pipe, and competing with billions of other packets per second on that pipe, so your actual speed, your computer to Wiki's server, unless you live within a few miles of the server, is still going to run no more than 2mbps (and I've rarely seen that speed, although the internet now runs well above 1mbps). It's like putting an afterburner on your Porsche. It's still going to crawl in a rush hour traffic jam. The data will get from AT&T's office to you so fast that you could probably download the Library of Congress in a day - if they had it at their office. But that's the speed you're buying - you to your ISP, NOT you to the rest of the world. So until every internet pipe and node is wide enough to handle all the traffic on it at gigabit speeds, we're not going to get a Speedtest test going to 1gbps.
That's what's so phony about Verizon's old "fiber right to the door" commercials. My cable company had "fiber right to the pole". The only non-fiber was from the pole to my house, and that cable can carry a lot more than the 50mbps I was buying (and the TV signals that were coming in on the same cable). (I paid for 3mbps and they kept increasing the speed over the years without increasing the price, so I didn't complain.) Adding fiber from the pole to your modem doesn't add anything to your speed. Using 3/4" fiber for 65,000 customers means that they'll each have a chance of getting on the internet, but that last mile (from the pole to the house)? Thin Ethernet (RG-59) can handle well in excess of 250mbps if you account for the loss over the distance, so making that run fiber instead of cable was a marketing gimmick.
And the fact that almost none of your connections is going to be over 1mbps is why I don't buy "extra high speed internet" for a family of two. If we're each downloading 2 files, that's 4mbps bandwidth we need. Add a phone call (we have a VoIP phone system) and it's still not 5mbps. I download huge files while my wife plays World of Warcraft (anyone who plays is aware of how costly even a quarter second of lag can be) and she never knows. The world may be going to you-know-where, but it's not in a handbasket, it's in some marketing VP's ad copy that sells you internet speed that you'll only use when you connect to speedtest.net.
