| Beyond AT&T 24 Meg: 100 is Ready To Go |
| Written by Dave Burstein |
 Randall Stephenson has 1.5M BellSouth lines ready to upgrade to 100 megabit. Because BellSouth ran fiber to the curb years, It would probably be cheaper to give these homes 100 megabits than to provide 25 meg U-Verse. The 100 meg service was announced and ready to go before the merger but killed after. I was told AT&T killed the project because they "wanted a uniform product." They thought the other customers would be angry if they couldn't get the same speed. That's also why AT&T still won't sell 40 and 50 megabits to the many U-Verse customers close enough to get the higher speeds. U-Verse is designed for rock solid 25 megabits for all. Many, probably the majority can get 40 or 40 megabits.
Ralph de la Vega, an old BellSouth DSL guy, now runs AT&T and realizes people want speed. Over a year ago, he said at Om Malik's conference he would sell the full 25 meg of U-Verse to customers if they didn't want AT&T's TV package. He's now come through and usually customers will be able to get TV as well if they want it. Bill Smith at the FCC Tuesday talked about some neat tricks to high speeds on data when the house isn't watching 3 HD programs at the same time. Randall Stephenson years ago asked me "Why would anyone ever need more than 24 megabits?" 100 meg VDSL was already coming out of the labs, and I still think it was stupid not to run it from the basement in Chicago apartment buildings. Verizon is, and I wish they would get to my neighborhood. Oldtimers will remember when Bill Gates asked "Why would anyone ever want more than 640K?" MSDOS and early Windows were in trouble for years because they soon needed more.Any geek after a few minutes knew Randall didn't get it, but why should he? He was the CFO at that time, "a good numbers man." I expected problems when he took over but AT&T has done remarkably well under Randall. He apparently learned a heck of lot about the network quickly, and trusted good people like John Stanky to make tech decisions. They have done remarkably well with IPTV, a system I thought would be underpowered against cable. They just reached 2M U-Verse video customers, many very happy. It's a scandal AT&T didn't honor BellSouth's commitment to those 1.5M homes. In return for exemptions from unbundling rules, they had committed to do the upgrades. Bob Blau of BellSouth went over with me the new technology they would install for 50 and 100 megabits. 100 meg chips were brand new, and he promised the FCC Chairman as soon as new gear was ready they would be installed. Kevin consulted an unlikely friend, a round DSL expert with a beard, who confirmed to him Blau's request for a delay for technical reasons made sense. Everything was just out of the lab and nothing was standard. When the merger happened, for whatever reason, Martin decided not to insist. The picture is Randall Stephenson, Larry Cohen of his union, and #2 House Democrat Jim Clyburn. The fourth guy brought them together, Ernest Hollis. Hollis's ADE promotes broadband at expensive events and supports AT&T in political circles. ADE has an application in for stimulus money. With friends like that, it has to be hard for NTIA to turn down his application. That's how the world usually works. I haven't read ADE's application and voice no opinion. Slews of the stimulus applicants have heavy duty political connections, perhaps none more so than One Economy, with ties directly to Julius Genachowski and the White House. I hear good things about them and their projects, but haven't looked closely. |
