AT&T’s decision to deploy VDSL and FTTN instead of FTTH was done mostly to keep impatient investors happy and keep costs low. The telco will be spending less than a third of Verizon’s $23 billion FiOS budget on initial deployments. Of the eighteen million homes AT&T hopes to pass with U-Verse by the end of 2008, about a million of them will be FTTH. However, those users won’t see any difference in service from the U-Verse being delivered to VDSL users (6Mbps max speed, single HD stream), despite having all that potential capacity.Why? AT&T has told us the goal was to create “a consistent user experience across the board.” This user in our U-Verse forum is one of those lucky (unlucky) FTTH customers in Oklahoma who decided to give the service a spin anyway, and ultimately decided it wasn’t quite ready for prime time:
Well, that was short lived. We canceled it. Over the last few days we experienced lots of freezing on the HD channels. A reboot of the STB and/or RG fixed it for a bit, and then it would come back. Also, the HD quality was very mediocre. To add to that, it was even worse when played back form the DVR. When AT&T gets their act together in terms of reliability and features, I’ll give it a try again. No bad blood here, just disappointment. I WANTED it to work out.
[From AT&T Fiber To The Home - Is U-Verse ready for prime time?]
Browsing Posts in IPTV
Two good articles on this topic:
Avical’s DVE User-Level Video Calibration Tutorial
