As it stands, the fastest tier AT&T offers is the company's "Max" 18Mbps/1.5Mbps U-Verse tier, which costs $65 a month as part of a TV bundle. We're now seeing rumblings in our forums that the carrier may unveil a $75, 24Mbps downstream 2Mbps upstream tier in the middle of August. AT&T wouldn't comment on the rumor, only telling us "We've got no specific plans to share at this time." Of course, that's what they said when we leaked news of their 18Mbps tier last fall.

Rumors of the faster tier come as AT&T competitor Comcast continues its deployment of faster DOCSIS 3.0 service, which offers 22/5Mbps ($62.95) and 50/10Mbps ($99 per month) tiers. AT&T's decision to save upfront investment capital and deploy fiber to the node and VDSL service instead of fiber to the home, means AT&T's broadband service continues to suffer from distance limitations in the fight against cable.

Customers as close as 1,400 feet from the DSLAM have registered speeds of 100Mbps to their home gateways, while customers at 1,850 feet see total potential speeds closer to 58Mbps. But most customers sit further out, and customers as far as 5,000 feet may struggle to get 25Mbps from AT&T's service -- that bandwidth also being shared between data and AT&T's IPTV service.

AT&T employs TV signal compression tricks and variable bit rate encoding in order to squeeze data and TV service out of constrained pipes. Given that few AT&T customers watch 2 HD shows, 2 SD shows, and download full throttle simultaneously, AT&T has had a little wiggle room in providing 18Mbps downstream.

But 24? Last year, AT&T had to change their terms of service to "better manage customer expectations" as to how much bandwidth they're actually getting. The carrier had hoped by this point to have perfected VDSL line bonding, which would allow faster speeds at longer loop lengths, but the technology won't be ready until 2010. So will 24Mbps only be available to non-IPTV customers, or has AT&T further perfected their compression tricks (and at what cost to image quality)? Hopefully we'll find out soon.

Meanwhile, for AT&T's top shelf premium product aimed at heavy users, 2Mbps upstream is starting to look a little long in the tooth. Not to bludgeon a deceased Equus Caballus, but much of this could have been avoided if AT&T had decided to follow Verizon's lead and heavily invest in fiber to the home technology, instead of placating myopic investors (who in telecom lack patience and long-term vision) by nursing copper infrastructure.

Update: User djrobx directs our attention to this thread in our forums, which answers a few more questions. AT&T appears to be in the process of deploying an entirely new 32Mbps/5Mbps gateway profile intended to not only support the faster speeds, but three simultaneous HDTV streams as well. There's still a lot of questions about the particulars we won't see answered until AT&T makes the new tier official. While the tier hasn't been officially announced yet, several customers insist AT&T sales reps are already pitching the tier to customers.