AfterDawn: News

AT&T to expand IPTV efforts

AT&T is delighted with the performance of its Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) service so far, and plans to ramp up deployments in the coming year. Chief Executive Officer Ed Whitacre spoke about the plans for IPTV at the company's fourth-quarter 2006 earnings call. He said the company targets to make the U-verse IPTV service available to around 8 million homes by the end of 2007.

"Our fiber-to-the-node network is performing better than we had anticipated," he said. "We're getting better bandwidth both on the short and long loop links. And the customer feedback has been very good, outperforming what's available from cable." AT&T's service is available in 11 markets so far, less than the company's prediction of 15 by the end of 2006.



Ever since the company began testing the service, it experiences glitches related to the software. The company said that the delays did not reflect any problems with the network architecture. "It works and it works well," Whitacre said of the infrastructure. "The delays and difficulties have been related to programming. And we think we are just about to get all those issues solved."

The software foe the IPTV service has been provided by Microsoft, which also supplies other services around the world including Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, T-Online France, British Telecommunications and Swisscom, with several more in testing.

Source:
News.com

Written by: James Delahunty @ 28 Jan 2007 15:51

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• 4 comments

• minidiez

  Sounds good, but how much is going to cost?

  29.1.2007 15:37 #1

• solarf

  that is indeed the question to ask" How much?"

  29.1.2007 17:10 #2

• ZippyDSM

  what I want is to pay for jsut the channles I want to see,maybe give software to run it in a PC and a box top device for the TV pipe it threw current networking devices keep the prices low and you will automatically be better than the pompous sat and cable monopolies...

  30.1.2007 07:18 #3

• Mr-Movies

  Fiber as a backbone is a must but my guess is that their subscriber base is low, what happens when they max the through put of the backbone or are they going to bring dedicated fiber to each home instead of a node. As I recall each node probably handles a couple hundred users depending on what they are speaking of so to me if they are sharing this with ISP downloading they are going to max out and degrade their performance.
  
  Also comparing to cable is not saying much in my opinion.
  
  ISP providers already are concerned about their band width this should really test there capabilities. I can't believe the resolution is that great, due to bandwidth problems, so are they providing a DivX quality or HD 1080p?

  30.1.2007 07:28 #4