Buried in yesterday's AT&T earnings (kind of like their vanilla DSL subscriber numbers) was the fact that the telco will be slowing their deployment of U-Verse. According to AT&T, deployment of the VDSL technology is going to be slowed by a year, so they can focus on marketing the service to those already within range of U-Verse. In a conference call with analysts yesterday, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson called it "a more elegant build plan."

The new plan will hit AT&T's goal of 30 million homes passed in 2011 -- a year later than they originally projected. The new plan lowers deployment costs, AT&T saying they'll be reducing 2009 capital expenditures by 10% to 15% compared to 2008's $20.3 billion CAPEX. U-Verse currently reaches 17 million living units, though AT&T has just over a million current U-Verse subscribers. AT&T has roughly 15 million broadband subscribers total.

"We’ve got 17 million households passed, and a lot of those were turned up in this past year," AT&T CFO Rick Lindner told conference call attendees yesterday, calling that total "a good base of homes to sell into to start with." "Between homes already passed and those we will build in the next year or so, we are hitting the markets with highest priority," he says. Lidner insists the new plan will help AT&T continue the build with current resources.