With all of the iPhone hype, AT&T’s taken something of a beating around the quality of its cellular network. Meanwhile, the company’s wireline ventures chug along without much public notice. This week AT&T’s U-verse IPTV service went live in Cleveland and Akron Ohio, bringing the total number of homes passed with U-verse to 3 million. (Compared to Verizon’s 6.8 million locations passed with FiOS fiber)
Additionally, earlier this month AT&T announced it will be moving forward with GPON deployments starting in 2008. What’s GPON you say? It’s a form of optical networking technology that AT&T will use when building out fiber to the home (FTTH). Today AT&T’s U-verse service runs on a fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) architecture, but FTTN has limitations, and those limitations are glaringly obvious when compared to Verizon’s all-fiber approach. In new locations (called greenfield) AT&T has decided it will match Verizon fiber for fiber.