AT&T Complains About Ads Mocking U-Verse Capacity Crunch > technology vs. infrastructure

reply to poolek

Re: technology vs. infrastructure

I'm not questioning the technical superiority of DOCIS 3.0 to VDSL. I'm saying that for -most- users, what ATT is able to squeeze out of copper is good enough - at least for now - and the rate of technological innovation on that old copper is growing fast enough to keep up with -most- user's demands. For most users, 3 HD streams and a 24/3 internet connection suffices.

If extra speed and capacity were a killer advantage, all it would take would be for TWC to offer a higher speed than ATT could possibly offer with Uverse at a price equal to or cheaper than the top plan on UVerse, and you'd see customers flock to cable. That doesn't happen. -Most- users couldn't tell you the difference between 3mb and 30mb service, so ATT's offer, despite its technical disadvantage, is good enough for them to retain and add new customers daily. If I remember correctly, there was an article posted here recently where Uverse had the lowest churn rate in the industry.

reply to gia
the HD streams are unlimited until they move them from broadcast to switched digital video but that should not be a problem if they are monitering SDV usage at the tech operations center.

TWC can add more SDV QAMs to the pool or move a channel back to broadcast at&t cant do that they dont have a fixed broadcast architechure in place like cable does.

TWC started out 8 SDV QAMs and now are getting their divisions to add 8 more SDV QAMs to keep up with the HD channel explosion.

If the DOCSIS 3.0 gets congested and SDV has timeout errors they just splice in a new node which takes about a day to do.

TWC austin kept doing node split after node split when they were doing only 8 QAMs for SDV so they should not have as much problems until they get to 125-150HD channels switched at which point they can move more analogs to digital and rearrange and make those freed up spaces SDV QAMs they just did this with 5 analogs in janauary or do node splits again. but the statistics say 250 homes subscribed/passed per node is a good number for SDV as they have found that at all times about 40-50 channels are tuned to in a single node of course locals have to stay broadcast SD and Digital and so does the entire basic tier SD or they are violating FCC rules.