San Antonio-based AT&T, the nation’s biggest phone company, said it has ironed out technical glitches with the service and is readying an expansion of its U-verse IPTV service that will take it to all major cities in its 22-state service area and 8 million households by year-end, reports the San Antonio News Express.
“We’re ready to take our foot off the brake and step on the accelerator,” John Stankey, AT&T’s group president for operations, said Tuesday. “By the end of the year, we will be up and running in every significantly sized market where we operate.”
The company quietly began offering U-verse in Milwaukee, Wis., this week. It will launch next week in Dallas-Fort Worth and later in the month in Kansas City. The expansions will bring to 14 the number of markets where the service is available.
AT&T launched U-verse in San Antonio last June and expanded into Houston and nine other markets late last year. The company, eager to bundle video with phone and Internet services, wants to reach 19 million customers by the end of 2008.
The company’s partners in the video rollout include Microsoft, whose software lets customers receive programming over Internet lines, and Motorola, which produces set-top boxes for the service.
Rival phone company Verizon Communications Inc. is installing new fiber directly to customers’ houses to deliver its video service, called FiOS.
“Today, one or two high-definition streams is fine for most people,” said Michelle Abraham, analyst with research firm In-Stat. “But there’s no question that in the future, people will be bringing more and more HD sets into their homes. They may want to watch one HD channel while recording another while someone in the other room watches a third.”
Stankey, however, said AT&T has no plans to take fiber directly to customer homes, except in new housing developments. If bandwidth demands rise in the next few years, the company has the option of using technology that doubles up its copper wires or brings its fiber-optic lines deeper into neighborhoods.
“That still makes more economic sense than going in and building fiber directly to the home,” he said.
Fiber to neighborhood nodes costs less than running it to homes. AT&T spends $270/home while Verizon spends $933/home for each home passed. AT&T’s node-to-home bandwidth is about 24Mbps, enough for its maximum 6Mbps broadband and a couple of television channels, but two HD channels would be a stretch.
But AT&T won’t reach its 18 million home goal this year, the original “Lightspeed” goal, reports USA Today. Instead, it will reach less than half the original target: 8 million.
Some analysts have speculated that AT&T might shift its strategy to include more fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) deployment, says Telephony Magazine.
Tellabs, the chief supplier of fiber access gear to Verizon Communications and the former BellSouth, has been having more intimate discussions with AT&T following its merger with BellSouth, according to the vendor’s chief financial officer, Tim Wiggins.
We’re having much more strategic discussions with AT&T, Wiggins said. How that plays out time will tell.
