Given their decision to milk copper and stick with VDSL, AT&T is continually juggling last mile bandwidth capacity, managing user demand for HDTV streams, broadband and voice using
compression and prioritization (as in: reducing your Internet speed if your entire house starts watching HD programming). Aside from their inability to match cable's 50-100 Mbps service speeds, the company has done fairly well at this balancing act -- offering top speeds of 24/3 Mbps, while also offering
3 HD streams. Those three streams
will soon be four:
Speaking at the event, held in Newport Beach, Calif., Stankey tried to dispel early concerns about whether AT&T had enough capacity to fuel its IPTV service, announcing that the company intends to introduce four HD streams per home by the end of the year, up from the current three, thanks to a combo of more efficient compression and more bandwidth.
As we
noted in July, that additional bandwidth is coming courtesy of VDSL channel bonding, which allows AT&T to offer slightly more bandwidth at an additional 1-2,000 feet from the VRAD using additional copper pairs. However, AT&T's putting that additional bandwidth toward video,
not user data speeds. AT&T says being unable to meet cable speed tiers faster than 24 Mbps down 3 Mbps up is ok, since most people don't buy it anyway:
While AT&T has found the capacity to beef up its managed IPTV service, Stankey downplayed the company's positioning against Docsis 3.0-based cable modem services, which typically outpace U-verse's top tier. He questioned whether there's much demand for D3 speeds. "The fact of the matter is we sell 18- and 24-meg products. The bulk of our customers choose not to buy that," he said, noting that most see the value in AT&T's 6-Mbit/s tier.
Stankey omits AT&T's specific weakness at offering
upstream bandwidth (their
website likes to do that too), or the fact that millions of distance-constrained or un-upgraded AT&T customers
only have the choice of 6 Mbps, which is magically why so many AT&T customers choose it.
Of course today's power user is tomorrow's average user -- and come tomorrow -- AT&T's still going to have to find a way to increase speeds further. Barring getting into
rocket pigeon connectivity, they'll either have to finally bite the bullet and install last mile fiber (which investors won't approve because it requires waiting for returns), or keep their fingers crossed that some of these ultra-fast DSL variants
being cooked up in the Alcatel Lucent labs (though still distance constrained) arrive sooner rather than later.
