The phone companies may be sluggish, but they’re not dead, as evidenced by AT&T’s announcement this morning that it would provide up to 10 mbps download and 1.5 mbps upload speeds to customers in its U-Verse service area. The move puts AT&T’s broadband offerings on par with cable, which is currently eating the telcos’ lunch with triple-play services. Sadly, the U-Verse universe is so far available to only 5.5 million homes in AT&T’s total service area, though the company’s goal is to pass the 17 million-mark by the end of 2008.
Great news on the speed, but how much does it cost?
I recently had to choose between Bellsouth (AT&T) and Comcast for a double-play (telephone and internet). Went with Comcast because of the superior speeds. Bellsouth had a confusing menu of various speed tiers, most of which sucked compared to cable.
We don’t have a tv. The internet is more entertaining!
http://www.RSSLiveTV.com
I wouldn’t say cable cos are eating telcos’ lunch with triple play. Telcos will have a leg up with ‘quad play’, care of wireless service (where AT&T is kicking butt thanks to iphone – http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=205917892&subSection=News.
And IPTV will have the long run advantage over cable because of the content capacity benefits of switched video architecture (licensing and aggregating content to fill all this space will be a different story). See Ralph de la Vega’s address at NewTeeVee Live:
http://blog.kelseygroup.com/index.php/2007/11/14/newteevee-live-keynote-atts-ralph-de-la-vega/