AT&T is slowly killing off the "U-Verse" brand after its $69 billion acquisition of DirecTV. A business class customer wrote in to inform us that he was told in an e-mail that moving forward, AT&T's broadband and phone services will simply be named "AT&T Internet" and "AT&T Phone." AT&T has confirmed to DSLReports.com that they're eliminating the U-Verse brand from its services as an act of "simplicity."
For example, AT&T customers with a 45 Mbps plan will see the service referenced generically as “AT&T Internet” and the specific tier as “AT&T Internet 45."
"To make it simpler for our customers, AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet service and U-verse Voice services have new names: AT&T Internet and AT&T Phone," the notification states. "There is no change to your speed, voice plans, or price and you will see the new names on future bills, correspondence, and online."
AT&T has already been moving away from the U-Verse name by directing new TV customers instead to the company's DirecTV satellite TV service. The company will likely then use the freed bandwidth from that transition to improve overall broadband speeds. Existing U-Verse TV customers are being supported for now, but it's unclear how long that will last.
Meanwhile there's some indication that the DirecTV name will be going away as well, but not until after the company has established its new streaming video service under the DirecTV brand later this year.
"We will continue to use DirecTV as the product name of our lead TV offer until the launch of our next-generation TV platform," an AT&T internal memo from late last year notes. "Once we have established our next generation TV platform, we plan to transition all TV product names to AT&T Entertainment to symbolize our move to a single entertainment portfolio."
"The names "AT&T Internet" and "AT&T Phone" are about simplicity for our customers," AT&T told DSLReports.com in an e-mail.