| reply to WeSRT4
Re: Should I be impressed? U-Verse hasn't really been around all that long. The majority of existing customers are in markets served by legacy SBC. SBC's previous territory covered 13 states including the big hitters of California, Texas, Illinois, and Ohio. SBC bought out the old AT&T long distance company and changed its name to AT&T around the time of the first U-Verse rollout. AT&T selected a FTTN architecture to carry data to customers. Fiber is fed from a CO to a node within the general neighborhood of those customers that it is designed to serve. Newer flavors of DSL such as VDSL, VDSL2 and bonding two ports of those technologies together to form a single large "pipe", as they they, then ride on traditional copper wire to the customer's home/business.
At the same time, BellSouth was gearing up for its own yet to be named IPTV service in its nine state territory. Just like AT&T, it also selected Microsoft's software to provide the user interface. However, it selected a FTTC transport architecture that is similar to FTTN except that there are more fiber nodes needed because they are closer to the customer (the curb). Copper was still to be used for the final connection but used older and slower flavors of DSL such as ADSL2 adn ADSL2+. BellSouth wasn't ready to trust the newer VDSL technologies but needed to continue forward in building this new network. The biggest markets in BellSouth's region are in Georgia, Florida, and North Carolina.
AT&T and BellSouth already jointly owned both Cingular and the Yellow Pages and it made alot of sense for AT&T to buy BellSouth. Instead of having three of everything (corporate offices, legal, advertising, customer care etc.), costs could be reduced substantially by combining redundant operating units. The entire industry has been in this mode since the collapse of WorldCom. Per minute cell phone rates have dropped significantly in recent years and there isn't enough total money in the pie for all operators to exist as they once did.
Therefore, AT&T bought out BellSouth and so took control of the decision making process regarding the IPTV product that it had yet to rollout to market. AT&T decided to scrap the older and slower ADSL flavors that BellSouth had intended to use so as to increase economies of scale when purchasing the newer VDSL equipment. This change also reduced the number of fiber nodes that needed to be installed and created a consistent nationwide architecture that would be easier to manage from a centralized location. Customer support would have been a nightmare if the same product needed to be handled by seperate help desks depending on the underlying architecture used to provide service. This is something that previous Nextel subscribers have had to deal with ever since Sprint took that company over. The bills now arrive in the mail from Sprint but you have to deal with a different help desks because Nextel's network architecture is not the same or even compatible with that of Sprint. This is one of the main reasons that merger has been considered by many to be a failure and also why Sprint has been hemorrhaging both customers and cash ever since. But I digress....
To make a long story even longer, AT&T's decision to align BellSouth's IPTV efforts with its own and create a consistant U-Verse product delayed the launch within BellSouth's 9 state region by at least a year. Comcast is the biggest competitor in markets such as Atlanta, Miami, and Charlotte. You may think that the 1 million mark took too long but I wouldn't be surprised if the next million takes less than half that time. The old BellSouth states should see an exponential increase in U-Verse availability in 2009/2010 and service coverage in existing markets will continue to expand. I will say though that even if the "phone company" is considered to be slow in bringing new products to its customers, it is fully committed to support them when they do. I waited forever for DSL to be available at my home when it was the next best thing to sliced bread about 8 years ago. When it finally did arrive it worked flawlessly 99% of time and when it didn't they were quick to send someone out to repair it. I've read alot of postings on here from folks complaining about poor and/or slow DSL service so maybe I got lucky. However, I'm a bonafide tech-junkie-nerd and most instances in which I've had problems with DSL it is almost always a fault with my wireless router, a crimp in phone wire connecting my DSL modem to the jack, or even the wire not being fully inserted into the jack iself (doh!). Non-techs generally prefer to assume it is the provider's fault even though a quick modem/router reboot is usually all it takes to make life better again.
SOURCES:
»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_x
»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Verse |
