U-Verse users indicates that AT&T is finally starting to roll out dual stream HD to some users in the St. Louis market. So far, users who sign up for 10Mbps VDSL data service say their gateway is syncing at 25Mbps and they're getting two HD streams without any apparent loss in quality. I'd seen reports of U-Verse gateways syncing at nearly 100Mbps, though we're talking about only 1,400 feet from the DSLAM. It seems that 25Mbps is working well at distances of 3,000 feet; distances higher than 5,000 feet are where the trouble starts.

To fit dual HD streams into that 25Mbps while leaving room for other services, AT&T has been mastering compression techniques. Providing dual HD streams is an important competitive milestone because until it's implemented, U-Verse TV simply isn't on par with many cable & satellite HD offerings.

AT&T will be spending less than a third of what Verizon is spending to deploy FiOS, a move that pleases skittish and impatient investors, but makes providing DOCSIS 3.0 competitive speeds and HD capacity a challenge. It's hard to think U-Verse will ever match FiOS, but the dual streams is at least a step in the right direction.

AT&T says they'll also offer pair bonded VDSL by the end of this year. To offer bonded VDSL, AT&T needs to assign two DSLAM ports to each customer, and deploy a special residential gateway outside the house that can terminate two pairs. That should help the HD bandwidth crunch, and allow AT&T to offer faster speeds than 10Mbps.