AT&T Plans To Use Lessons Learned From DSL Rollout AS IPTV Launches

That’s a good thing as anyone who remembers the over-promised, under-delivered early days of DSL can tell you. AT&T can’t afford that kind of marketing hit or the customer service hangover when it comes to IPTV. AT&T EVP Christopher Rice told CNET: “We expect demand to be very strong. But we need to be careful how we manage this demand. We learned a lot of lessons from the early days of DSL. We don’t want demand to outstrip capacity.”
AT&T plans to be competitive with pricing for what is still called U-verse but he said being a low-cost provider isn’t on the agenda. As we mentioned the other day, it also doesn’t plan to launch with all the bells and whistles; the working idea is get it deployed with features that work and meet the competition’s (cable and satellite) offferings. Christine Heckart, the marketing GM for software provider Microsoft TV, explained that focus: “This year we just need to get solid deployments with competitive offerings. … It’s a new market for carriers with brand new technology. The rollout will be very high-touch. It’s hard to get cookie cutter about these early deployments, and there will be glitches that need to be worked out.”
Related: Post-Hype IPTV Reality For AT&T, Verizon

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