| De la Vega on U-Verse and LTE |
| Written by Dave Burstein |
AT&T financials report 162K traditional DSL subscribers lost Q3, while adding 252K to U-Verse. T's overall wireline revenues were down 7% over the prior year, although they fired enough people to keep margins similar. T did report one important milestone: across U-Verse areas marketed for 24 months or more, overall penetration now exceeds 20 percent. That proves that U-Verse TV can compete against cable, something that was long in doubt. Microsoft's IPTV system is doing remarkably well, with many compliments on the interface quality.
Flash: I just got my review copy of Ralph de la Vega's book, Obstacles Welcome. An easy read and an amazing story, it's only $16.49 at Amazon. At that price, it's a no-brainer for everyone in the industry to grab a copy. It's a motivational style book, but there's enough directly relevant to the business to take a look. Ralph's personal style is modest, but he's one of the most thoughtful people in the industry. http://www.amazon.com/Obstacles-Welcome-Adversity-Advantage-Business/dp/1595552642/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256795816&sr=1-1 From AT&T's investor call, some Ralph de la Vega love. “U-verse is helping redefine the consumer space. Our U-verse broadband attach rates continue to run above 90%. The attach rates for U-verse voice, our VOIP service, continues to be above 60%, and more than three-quarters of our U-verse customers were triple or quad play. TV subs are up more than 1 million. U-verse voice connections are up 631,000, and consumer wireline broadband connections are up 821,000. Where we have U-verse deployed and marketed, access line decline trends are better, revenues per household are better, and brand perceptions are better. It drives up revenues per household. U-verse helps retain customers. As U-verse grows, we are starting to see a directional change.” Where they don't have U-Verse, broadband subs are significantly declining and churn I believe much higher. De la Vega also promised “an aggressive program of investment to further enhance our wireless network. ... we will begin LTE deployment in 2011. We will be using our 700-megahertz and AWS spectrum exclusively for LTE. This spectrum will cover 100% of the top 200 markets and 87% of the U.S. population.” That's not far behind Verizon's promised 92% LTE, assuring about 90% of the U.S. a 50 megabit broadband choice (DOCSIS 3.0) and at least three multi-megabit choices (DSL or FiOS, Verizon or AT&T LTE.) Washington is catching on, shifting the broadband focus to the last 5-10% and to bringing down the price. Despite the increased bandwidth demand, AT&T 3G performance is actually getting better. Again, from de la Vega “3G dropped calls are down 12%; 3G blocked calls are down 30%; and over the past 10 months, our composite quality index is up 25%.” http://seekingalpha.com/article/168288-at-amp-t-q3-2009-earnings-call-transcript?page=-1 |
