Verizon said at NxtComm last wee that it now has 500 thousand IPTV subscribers. This is an increase of about 300 thousand since the beginning of the year.
ATT stated that it had 40 thousand IPTV subscribers and that it will pass 18 million homes by the end of next year.
Verizon is doing extremely will and is likely to approach 1 million IPTV subscribers by the end of 2007. It is now one of the top handful of IPTV deployments globally.
It appears that ATT is still struggling to get off the ground. It looks like its results will be about half of what Verizon achieved in the first year of its commercial deployment.
ATT's claim that it will pass 18 million homes by the end of next year looks to be very difficult, if not impossible. It will be interesting to track its progress. I guess that I will feel more positive about their statements when ATT brings U-verse and VDSL to my house in San Francisco. It told me in October that a VDSL system serving my home would be installed at the end of January. The work has not started yet.
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Hi Bob,
How can you explain the gap between all the hype AT&T is creating and the slow deployment rate?
If they really solved all the technical issues, what prevents them from doing much broader deployments? it's not like they have to deploy fiber to every customer like VZ...
Using FTTN they were supposed to get a larger coverage for half the money VZ is investing.
is their ifra ready or are they still deploying more fiber and remote terminals throughout the country ?
At the NxtComm show last week AT&T was saying that it has 40 thousand U-verse subscribers and is adding new subscribers at a rate of 600 per day. It also said that it expects to increase this rate to 10,000 by the end of the year.
These 40 thousand subscribers are spread over 21 markets, which means than none of them has scaled very far. I wrote a recent blog entry about how ATT is using ice cream trucks to sell U-verse in Connecticut. I spoke to another analyst last week who saw a similar tactic in Houston but with a trailer blaring obnoxious music. ATT is not going to build a mass market service with these micro marketing techniques.
I beieve that ATT is way behind its original estimates for its FTTN deployment. I just don't think that it can catch up as rapidly as it is saying.
It has acknowledged that problems with its Microsoft software has slowed its U-verse rollout. Microsoft has acknowledged this. I wonder if there are problems with the VDSL technology as well.
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