James Delahunty
28 Jan 2007 15:51
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