Ma Bell has been working hard this season, rushing to roll out U-Verse and meet its promise of 11 markets before 2007. After launching UVerse in three cities yesterday, the company added four more cities to the list including Indianapolis.
With recent deployments, AT&T is hoping to give the perception that it is making progress. But how many people can actually sign up and get the service as of now? I tried to sign up, with little success. (We think Verizon is doing a much better job.)
Since cable companies are looking to raise prices, I am almost ready to give them the heave-ho as well. AT&T couldn’t take my business, so perhaps time to look elsewhere. The new Covad ADSL 2+ service announced yesterday sounds cool, but their press release didn’t talk specifics either.
When we checked with Covad, their PR person sent this email: “ADSL2+ is available now bundled with the Line Powered Voice service. As a standalone product, it is not available yet and will be made available in the coming year but we have no set timing for that now.” The problem is that you cannot find this information anywhere on their website (except for the press release) and you cannot sign up for their service. So why issue the press release now?
Anyway, it is time to call their sales line and see what kind of speed plans they are planning to offer. At 10 megs and higher, Covad can have my business!
5 comments so far
12:56 PM PT
Om,
Just a couple of thoughts regarding Covad’s ADSL2+. Right now Earthlink is offering it bundled like you said at 8mbits/1mbits. I wouldn’t expect Covad to be offering it themselves or letting their resellers offer it for awhile because Earthlink paid for the upgrade to Covad’s new DSLAMs.
Secondly, 10/1 would be nice but I’m not sure how nice it would be over copper. ADSL2+ is still half duplex and when compared with fiber, latency will never be anywhere near what fiber can offer.
If this is Covad’s long term strategy their dead. + The fact CLEC’s can’t use ILEC fiber since line-sharing has been killed.
9:40 PM PT
Covad maybe trying to field test ADSL2+ on select short lines, however for the speeds they are offering, you don’t need ADSL2+, you can do well with g.dmt. I think Will is right, Covad and Earthlink seem to have some kind of agreement.
9:44 PM PT
Sorry.. meant to write that you don’t need ADSL2+ for 10/1, you can still get this with ADSL1 (g.dmt) or ADSL2.
6:57 AM PT
Some comments about the first reply above. It is easy to see how Will Dean arrived at the conclusion that the Covad/Earthlink ADSL2+ service is somehow exclusive to Earthlink.
But as Covad and Earthlink have explained at their analyst meetings, it isn’t exclusive in any way.
Covad will be offering the 8mb service on its own or through other partners soon, and any time that another partner enables further expansion of the network Earthlink will benefit from a larger footprint as well.
This whole deal is actually more obvious when you look at the terms of the funding for this network expansion. Earthlink did not pay for the network, despite the simplistic headlines.
For this mutually beneficial project, Earthlink decided to accelerate the schedule with a loan to Covad earmarked specifically for this project. As a result, Covad owns both the equipment and responsibility to pay back the loan with interest.
9:23 AM PT
I know for a FACT that when they install VDSL2, at the back or the side of your house where the NID(Network interface demarcation) the techs will get 80 megs. Thats at the NID So this 10 meg at the house would never be enuff to let any iptv service work properly. i know standard def tv takes up 2 megs and High Def takes up 4 megs of bandwith. So if vdsl2 is available in your area and you can sign up for it I WOULD DO IT if i were you. its the wave of the future just like when cable started everyone said “it will never work who would pay for that?” Thats what everyone else is thing about VDSL2 (iptv service) Just wait cable companys will be switching over to it! lol maybe….
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