Lightspeed & HDTV
CFO Rick Lindner touched on the progress of “Project Lightspeed“, and the company’s “U-Verse” IPTV service. AT&T is currently only marketing the upgrades to some 6,200 homes, and 10% of them have signed up for service.
Lindner also touched on the company’s HD-schedule briefly: “The major milestone that is front of us yet is completion of the testing and approval of the next software upgrade and the final set-top boxes which will give us HDTV capability.” Fitting quality multiple HD streams on an already limited VDSL pipe has been the primary concern of many analysts when it comes to AT&T’s plan. Some believe AT&T will embrace FTTH before long.
Soon to be acquired BellSouth had slated their IPTV service launch for late 2006 or early 2007, and intended to deploy fiber within 5,000 feet of 50% of their customers by 2007 (at an average cost of $150 per home). Both AT&T and BellSouth plan to use Microsoft set-top software and MPEG-4 compression for IPTV over VDSL or better.
Meanwhile one of the telco giant’s future competitors in the HD space, DirecTV, has yet again delayed its MPEG-4 based HD-DVR. Forbes today noticed the delay; which has been the talk of Internet message boards for more than a month now. DirecTV does currently offer a Tivo based MPEG-2 HD-DVR.
