U-verse goes down for most of Sunday

Customers of U-verse, AT&T Inc.'s IPTV service, were hit with an outage across the nation for much of the day Sunday. Subscribers in many of the company's 33 TV markets lost service and, while technicians were able to restore local channels and some cable news and sports networks during the day, normal access to all channels didn't return until later in the evening, U-Verse reported. Internet forums filled with comments from angry customers with much of the ire aimed at AT&T's lack of technical support on a Sunday. AT&T said it is investigating the cause of the problem and trying to determine how many subscribers were affected and promised to review its customer support policies.

The company rolled out U-verse last year and experiencing delays and then technical glitches. Analysts said the company appeared to have addressed many of those by the time it kicked its roll out into high gear early this year. U-verse had more than 100,000 subscribers in early September in markets nationwide, including San Antonio, Houston and Los Angeles. Subscriber numbers will be refreshed today when AT&T announces its quarterly earnings.

AT&T expects to reach nearly 18 million households as part of its initial deployment by the end of 2008. AT&T is adding about 40,000 miles of fiber to its network, bringing fiber even closer to customers' homes using fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) and fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) technologies. 

For More:
- Read this Associated Press Report