AT&T made two big announcements this week regarding its video plans: CFO Rick Lindner said the service provider will stop reselling DirecTV television services during the first quarter of 2008, and AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said that by 2010 the company will have expanded its U-verse IPTV service to 30 million customer locations, including the southeast region served by its BellSouth acquisition. By the end of this year AT&T's U-Verse service will top one million subscribers, far more than the 126,000 subs it had at the end of September.
"We will expand U-verse to 30 million customer locations including the southeast region by the year 2010," Stephenson said. "We know how to scale networks. We started a little wireless business in the '80s, from scratch, and we now have 67 million subscribers. In the '90s, we started a broadband business from scratch--today it's the largest in the U.S., with 14 million subscribers. This decade it's TV. We know how to do this. It will scale just like broadband, just like wireless. Our video build will be more efficient than either our wireless or broadband builds--that's the power of IP."
AT&T also announced that it has expanded its networking capacity to 40 Gbs capacity on more than 50,000 miles of its IP/MPLS national network. The company said the build out is partly to meet the growing demand for bandwidth for online video and other IP services.
For more on the U-Verse plans:
- read this article from Multichannel News
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