Yesterday we noted how AT&T has announced they are conducting DSL trials that will allow them to offer 80 Mbps broadband service, though we also noted that most of you (given long loop lengths) would probably never see those speeds. We spoke with AT&T about the trial, which the company says will use "pair bonding, vectoring, (and) spectrum management," and "can be done very inexpensively and on a per-user basis." AT&T did not respond to inquiries pressing on the very real distance limitations that seemingly make this "announcement" a little empty.
We talked a bit about the idea with industry analyst Dave Burstein, who spends a lot of time discussing advancements with gear makers. "The chips AT&T is using are mostly designed for up to 50 megabits downstream, so 80 with two bonded is quite reasonable," he says.
"However, what I hear on the business plans of AT&T was they didn't intend to use bonding for higher speed offerings, but only for extending the reach of their 25 megabits of IPTV," he says. "They've long had bonding + DSM as their contingency plan if 50 and 100 megabit cable really hurts, but I've seen no reason to believe that's in the next few years. So this is probably more a "proof of concept" than an indication of likely products," says Burstein.
Burstein acknowledges that given distance constraints and the fact these lines must share space with U-Verse HD streams (up to three at this point), this is "mostly" a PR stunt. Meanwhile, Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM had a chance to talk with AT&T's John Stankey, who gave her a little more insight into AT&T's thinking. Essentially, AT&T isn't worried about Comcast 50 Mbps service encroaching on their territory, because
they don't think users want those speeds yet:
quote:
"We’ve been doing wired broadband for 10 years and we have meaningful curves in terms of speeds and demand that are statistically accurate and predictable." Based on those curves Stankey said AT&T knows exactly how much data and throughput are needed as opposed to choosing a "nice round number" to shoot for. "We feel comfortable...based on how we deploy, that we can match the needs of the customer," Stankey said. For example, Stankey said that AT&T could extend fiber further along the local copper loop and then reduce the number of homes served by each neighborhood cabinet and shorten the distance bits have to travel over the last-mile copper.
Note there's no mention of
upstream speeds, or the fact that millions of AT&T customers only see top speeds of 6 Mbps. Comcast's triple play is not only helping the company leech AT&T landline customers, but they're also adding more broadband users per quarter (drawn in part by faster speeds). AT&T long ago decided to make the bet that they could please investors now (avoiding costly FTTH deployments) and make up ground later. The next three to five years are going to test that decision, though there's still nothing (except investor fear) blocking a move to FTTH down the road.
