MyDogHsFleas
Premium
join:2007-08-15
Austin, TX
 ·AT&T U-Verse
 ·AT&T Southwest
| reply to maartena
Re: Ditch copper.
I'm not, obviously, saying that copper is as good as fiber to the home, but you are unnecessarily negative about what AT&T can do with copper and where they stand competitively.
"Their biggest competitor is laying fiber" -- assuming you mean Verizon FIOS, they are not a competitor at this time, they serve different cities/neighborhoods (with very few exceptions). U-verse's competition is primarily cable, and they are adding subs and cities about as fast as they can.
"Struggling with more than one HD stream" -- where do you get the "struggling" part? 2HD/2SD is deployed everywhere now. A few customers who are at the fringes of range from the VRAD can only get 1HD.
"No upload past 1Mbps" -- geez do some simple research, they offer 1.5 megabit uploads in the two top tiers. And again comparisons to FIOS are not germane because they don't compete.
"Time to ditch copper and switch to fiber" -- this is a very simplistic view of the situation. First, AT&T U-verse DOES support FTTH, in new greenfield developments where fiber is laid to start with. Second, it's really not an "either-or". The VRAD deployment brought the fiber within 3000 feet of the customer, it's just the last 1/2 mile that needs to be upgraded when it's time to fatten the pipe all the way to the home.
And, the fact that powered, intelligent, active VRADs are in place everywhere, and that they are already on video over IP, means that they can be much more flexible in distributing capability throughout their network, as compared to the usual passive optical or DOCSIS network, which only has powered equipment back at the office. |
