Buried in a Reuters report -- focusing largely on wireless broadband and smartphones -- is an interesting note. According to Reuters, AT&T "plans a residential broadband trial in June to allow Web surfing at speeds of 80 megabits per second." That's of course much faster than AT&T's top speed of 24 Mbps for their U-Verse service; however, it's not clear those speeds are even possible for most AT&T users given the company's decision to save money and use fiber to the node instead of fiber to the home.

While some U-Verse gateways on very short loop lengths (like 1,400 feet) can see speeds of 100 Mbps, that bandwidth has to be shared with HDTV signals, and most users have longer lines and are lucky to see 25 Mbps at 3,000 feet. AT&T has had continually delayed plans to employ bonded VDSL, which will slightly boost speed (25% or so) and extend line reach. Still, even with that upgraded technology the vast majority of AT&T users won't see anything near 80 Mbps.

So if it's not fiber and bonded VDSL won't offer those kinds of speeds to most users, what is AT&T planning to do? AT&T's Seth Bloom tells Broadband Reports the trial will look at "pair bonding, vectoring, (and) spectrum management," which Bloom insists "can be done very inexpensively and on a per-user basis." By per user, we assume he means a select number of AT&T customers with optimal copper.

Comcast has now pushed 50 Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 service to more than 90% of the cable company's footprint, with plans to deploy 100 Mbps service to roughly 20% of the cable giant's markets by the end of the year. While most users still don't need those kinds of speeds yet -- AT&T finds itself behind the marketing curve in terms of speed. That's not the end of the world, but it's also not great when you want to be seen as a next-generation broadband provider.

We know that AT&T is currently testing bonded VDSL in certain employee homes, and Stankey claims that if the trials are successful, AT&T "could" launch commercial services early next year. Again though, compression and other tricks will only go so far in trying to squeeze 80 Mbps and multiple HD streams into distance-constrained copper. Of course, that was the choice AT&T made when they decided to placate myopic investors and milk copper instead of following Verizon into more serious fiber to the home deployment.