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| Taiwan Beating AT&T to a Million |
| Written by Dave Burstein |
| Friday, 31 October 2008 03:45 |
  Chunghwa had 912,000 FTTB subscribers end of September and is about to pass one million. AT&T is proud that U-Verse will reach one million a month or two later. U-Verse is one meg up, going to 16 meg down. Chunghwa's fiber to the basement is designed for 50 to 100 meg in both directions.
AT&T has about nine times as many potential customers, and will inevitably pass Chunghwa in subscriber counts. They probably won't catch up in penetration or speed for the next decade. AT&T is proudly announcing U-Verse subscriptions are "meeting our schedule." Those in the industry know that's because the schedule is kept very modest compared to what others are doing. I ran some comparisons with IPTV in Shanghai as well. AT&T doesn't come close in deployment. AT&T will almost surely miss their target of 18-19M homes servable by yearend in SBC territory. They are at 14M end of September, including some in BellSouth. John Donovan, the new CTO, said they were on schedule for deployment. Forgive him; he wasn't even in the industry last year when they made those committments. The good news on U-Verse is it now works, and is doing much, much better than expected with TV quality. http://www.fastnetnews.com/dslprimelist/42-dsl-us-canada/475-houston-thinks-u-verse-will-succeed Zyzel is supplying the equipment for Chunghwa, using the mysterious Broadcom chips. It's a pity Broadcom isn't returning my email and phone calls, much less sending me a product sheet. Zyzel had some good things to say about the chip I need to factcheck. There's a reason Broadcom is uncomfortable with my reporting, which came too close to home once. It's time for them to stop ducking me. db |