2010 Year in Review: AT&T's U-verse turns around landline business

The news was buried in AT&T's second quarter earnings report: U-verse services topped $1 billion in revenue. It was a first for the telco, more than double the revenue it earned in the like quarter a year before, and it told a pretty compelling story.

At a time when cable competitors were losing subscribers, the second quarter marked yet another period of growth for U-verse, as it added 209,000 new customers, an increase of almost 60 percent over the past year.

The company said U-verse was continuing to drive a transformation in its consumer business, reflected by the fact that IP revenues represent 40.4 percent of AT&T's consumer wireline revenues, up from 30.6 percent in the year-earlier quarter.

Third quarter sales were just as solid for U-verse, which has turned around the company's sagging wireline business. U-verse added more than 236,000 customers and helped drive the first year-over-year growth in wireline consumer revenue in more than two years with a second straight quarter of billion dollar revenue ($1.1 billion).

Jeff Weber, VP of U-verse and video products, in April told FierceIPTV that the product was still in its infancy, and that new features would continue to roll out through the year.

"If you look back over the last few years, the constant cadence of applications and TV enhancements, and bringing mobile remote access to a handset, and U-verse online, there is a very regular cadence of improvement that our customers are getting," he said. "Because we're IP, because it's an all-IP infrastructure and software-based platform... there are an infinite number of things we can do on Multiview, but it's just one platform of innovation. There's whole-home DVR, TV applications, there's the ability to click from your remote and make a phone call, all of those are ways we can continue to integrate, drive innovation and create that differentiation and just better experience for customers. There's no telling a year from now the kind of capabilities we'll be rolling out for customers, but it is really fundamental shifts in improvement almost every year, almost every quarter."

Since the beginning of October alone, U-verse has added mobile TV services to Android phones, BlackBerry phones, Windows Phone 7 devices, scored well in a JD Power customer satisfaction survey, and launched service to Xbox 360s.

And it's continued to expand its footprint and add programming.