Template Tools
| AT&T U-Verse Build Essentially Ending http://bit.ly/kAIbd1 |
| Monday, 13 June 2011 21:30 |
|
My article at DSL Reports is straight from AT&T President John Stankey at Citibank: after reaching the 2011 goal of 30M homes passed, there will be very little additional U-Verse buildout. He announced 55-60% as their ultimate goal - about the same 30M homes. He suggested that 25-30% of AT&T homes will only be offered ADSL. 20% are "not a heavy emphasis for investment," i.e. 5-10 million of AT&T's 50 million homes are screwed unless they have a decent cable alternative. (Yes, rounding means not necessarily equal to 100 %.)
U-Verse is holding and winning customers much better than I and others expected. CFO Ritcher told investors "Consumer wireline is growing again, thanks to our U-verse product. We're really just seeing the benefits of scaling the service and it gives us great momentum. U-verse is transforming our consumer results. Where we offer U-verse, our ARPUs are higher, our churn is lower, our customer satisfaction is better across all of our products." I'm guessing that what's going on is that AT&T decided they had no choice but to raise capex on wireless, accelerating the LTE build to prevent falling too far behind Verizon. Expanding U-verse to 75-85% is almost surely profitable after cost of capital, but any competent CFO today would tell his boss "Don't raise capex if you can help it." More at http://bit.ly/kAIbd1
|
| Last Updated on Thursday, 16 June 2011 16:30 |