AT&T’s CFO Rick Lindner says that everything is on track for the company’s controversial IPTV service, U-verse. Speaking this morning at Credit Suisse’s Media and Telecom Conference Lindner said “we’re at the point where the pieces have come together for U-verse,” which relies on turbo-charged DSL connections to deliver multichannel video services along with high-speed Internet access and ultimately VoIP services.
“The Microsoft software, the new set-top boxes, the operating support systems, we’re ready now to go forward and launch additional markets and we’re ready to expand the markets where we have launched,” Lindner said. AT&T has already rolled out U-verse in San Antonio and Houston and plan to light up eleven more markets this month.
But skeptics have doubted whether the DSL-based architecture is robust enought to handle the bandwidth needed for video, not to mention high-definition video, plus very high-speed data services and VoIP. Lindner tried to dispel those doubts, expressed by the Credit Suisse analyst moderating his talk.
“We’re pleased with the bandwidth we’re getting over copper. At my house we’re getting 55 Mbps,” with the typical throughput being 25 Mbps. AT&T plans to implement pair-bonding, which doubles the DSL capacity, in areas where more bandwidth is needed.
Lindner also said that the company-wide deployment of AT&T’s HomeZone service, which is a hybrid between DBS video services and DSL high-speed options, shouldn’t be interpreted as a sign that U-verse won’t work in most AT&T markets. “We want to have a video product we can launch across our footprint and we want a video product that we can launch now,” Lindner said, instead of waiting for the protracted build-out of U-verse plant.
Lindner shed little light on the most burning question regarding AT&T: what’s the deal with the FCC’s delay in approving AT&T’s merger with BellSouth? Lindner did say that despite Chairman Kevin Martin’s push to remove the recusal of fellow Republican Robert McDowell, which would break the logjam holding up the FCC’s approval of the deal, the merger may not pass this final approval hurdle until January. The FCC is meeting again on December 20 and some observers have speculated that the deal would finally get approved on that date.
As an aside, McDowell himself was slated to speak at the Credit Suisse conference at 10:30 this morning, but for the life of me I can find no public webcast of McDowell’s talk, an odd thing for a government official.
Cynthia Brumfield at 12:16 PM|Comments(0)
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