Thread: AT&T Sets New U-Verse Goals

AT&T Sets New U-Verse Goals - Including Bellsouth, aims to reach 30 million users by 2010 - dslreports.com

Including Bellsouth, aims to reach 30 million users by 2010

AT&T stated that they had 126,000 customers of their VDSL-based IPTV service U-Verse at the end of last quarter. The company originally stated that U-Verse would pass (not necessarily serve) eight million households by the end of this year and 18 million homes by the end of 2008. However, those numbers didn't include BellSouth territory, so with today's controlled launch in Atlanta, the company updated their numbers:


Significant progress in AT&T U-verse deployment with total AT&T U-verse video subscribers expected to exceed 1 million by the end of 2008. Beginning its commitment to bring the benefits of AT&T U-verse services to the Southeast, AT&T today began a controlled launch of U-verse services in the Atlanta area.

AT&T is now stating that the service will be available to 30 million customers by 2010, and they hope to have signed up 1 million customers by the end of next year. The company will be spending up to $5 billion on U-Verse upgrades through the end of 2008. Compare that to Verizon's goal of running faster fiber directly to 18 million homes by 2010 at a cost of roughly $23 billion.


AT&T's projections are certainly possible, but our skepticism remains stubbornly trained on two competitive sticking points: the lack of dual HD streams and sluggish speeds (6Mbps) for a "next-generation" broadband service. AT&T insists to us these should be resolved next year; their elite VDSL tier will be bumped to 10Mbps with dual HD streams and faster speeds coming via pair bonding and compression.

I think I saw that dirty word. Compression.