AT&T will decelerate build out of its hybrid fiber/copper Project Lightspeed infrastructure that delivers the telco's bundled U-Verse offering, TelephonyOnline reports today.
The publication cites comments by AT&T executives in a conference call Tuesday discussing the company's Q4 2008 earnings and citing Lightspeed/U-Verse as a drag on profits.
Under the scaled back deployment, AT&T has decided to delay its goal of passing 30 million homes from 2010 to 2011, according to TelephonyOnline, and concentrate on the former BellSouth territory in the southeastern U.S. AT&T acquired in late 2006.
Last month, AT&T also pushed back the deployment of VDSL copper pair bonding technology to extend the severely limited range and throughput of U-Verse. The new target date is sometime this year, the second delay after a planned late 2007 deployment was scrapped.
2 comments:
I live in a suburb(within 30 miles) of Chicago where AT&T is the primary service provider. I moved here three years ago, and to this day, AT&T does not offer DSL (at any speed) to my subdivision! This is in a village with a median household income of $85K.
I think AT&T was short-sighted when they chose to deploy a FTTC architecture. If they are in this business for the long term, they should have invested the money in a longer term solution.
Your story illustrates the inaccuracy of the widespread misperception that broadband black holes exist only in rural areas of the United States. They can be found anywhere including the suburbs of major metro areas like yours.
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