Why AT&T's U-Verse Expansion Will Be Much Smaller Than You Think → Re: I am not the most up-to-date on upgrading UVerse

That's simply inaccurate.
AT&T does just fine without upgrading to FTTH, and according to the peanut gallery and Dane Jasper and Google, the cost has come down dramatically, so AT&T is proven quite wise to wait.

It may turn out that indeed, they can choose to never upgrade, especially if the customer base continues to refuse to pay the price for higher speeds. Management and investors do "get it". Insulting their intelligence doesn't change the math.

Mind you, I think AT&T is a horrible company that does nothing right by their customers, and I take great pleasure in permanently disconnecting them at every turn. But the business case is pretty clear, and they're not a charity.

The guys at Verizon who did FIOS get it. AT&T doesn't. They can't stay stagnant forever, and what they did is create a system that will be forever stagnant. Cable will keep upgrading with D3.1, small nodes, 8-channel bonding, etc, and U-Verse will have nowhere to go. The investors are driving AT&T into the ground with short-term thinking. They need leadership who actually has balls to go in there and do what's right for the company (lay as much fiber down as they physically can until they can serve nearly everyone) in the long term, not just for this quarter or next quarter, or the next 10 quarters, but for the long haul. When consumers realize how much U-Verse sucks, they'll switch back to cable or satellite, and AT&T will have to upgrade again, after having wasted millions on the kludge that is U-Verse.

AT&T should just cut their losses now, and wire their territory with GPON FTTH with IPTV, and then right-size the copper plant by reducing it's size and complexity significantly, scrapping a significant amount of the wiring out there, making as much of it as passive as possible, and using ADSL2+ to serve customers still on copper, as well as extremely rural customers with RDSLAMs where FTTH wouldn't pan out. They could differentiate their fiber and generate more profit by hitting the $70/1gbps price point, as opposed to bottom scraping like they sort of are now.

What would be even bolder is if they built an HSPA+/LTE microcell and public WIFI router into every home router, giving them a huge advantage in the wireless space.

Instead, they are throwing money down the drain by upgrading their copper system and making an already kludgy and overcomplicated system even worse.

The business is clear if you look at a couple of years. It's also very clear that FTTH is the right move for the long term business model.

OTOH, the government should allow them to start dismantling their copper plant in exchange for offering gigabit fiber service to each and every customer in each municipality where they want to dismantle copper.

Consumers aren't going to realize how much AT&T sucks and switch.
They don't care as much as you or I do. AT&T's speed, services and gizmos are more than adequate.

The "leadership" you refer to doesn't assure profitability, only a race to the bottom with cable, and it ain't gonna happen so long as they are publicly traded.

$70 FTTH doesn't sell.