Another sign of the coming end of AT&T's U-Verse

In late September, this blog predicted AT&T will abandon its Project Lightspeed/U-Verse deployment sometime in the first half of 2010 as part of a general retreat from the wireline-based residential/home office market segment.

Another sign of the coming end of the U-Verse universe emerged this week when AT&T pushed back -- again -- the rollout of VDSL copper pair bonding technology to extend the range and throughput of its bundled IP-based U-Verse product. The new target date is sometime next year, the second delay after a planned late 2007 deployment was pushed back a year.

The obstacle is the same one that has plagued AT&T 's ADSL service: not enough good, clean copper in the telco's last mile cable plant, much of it put in place decades ago to support POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) and never expected to support advanced digital services like ADSL let alone U-Verse. Telephony Online explains:

Perhaps a more pressing limitation, however, is the simple requirement for extra pairs of existing copper, which are not in plentiful supply in AT&T’s network outside the territory of the former BellSouth, where extra pairs were deployed extensively in the 1990s to accomodate dialup and fax services.