Re: AT&T's MSO Upgrade Stats
Thread,
I linked this to a previous post I did on Armstrong's plans for T's cable plant properties. Looks like it's full steam ahead for Armstrong's gutsy plan to by-pass the RBOCs and solve the Last Mile problem in their own way. BTW, the local telephony (cable telephony) forecast was verified by ANTC in yesterday's warning CC.
This came from the HLIT thread and I don't know it's source. But appears to be accurate. HLIT and ANTC both count T roughly as a 50% customer of theirs. So news of this nature is very important to them both.
MikeM(From Florida)
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AT&T Chairman Likes Company's Cable Position
The evidence of the company's success is that it's installing 3,000 digital television hookups per day.
Despite the looming threat of forced open access, grumbling from other operators, and the inability to finalize a telephone deal with Time Warner Cable, chairman Michael Armstrong is happy with AT&T's foray into the cable industry. "The real story is that today AT&T is executing," Armstrong said during an hour-long meeting this week with reporters at the Western Cable trade show in Los Angeles.
The evidence of the company's success is that it's installing 3,000 digital television hookups per day and will end the year with slightly less than two million digital subscribers, according to Armstrong. Further, he said, the company could end next year with 400,000 to 500,000 telephone subscribers, three million digital television subscribers, and 700,000 high-speed data customers. Those numbers, he said, prove that the concept of generating multiple revenue streams over a hybrid fiber/coax platform is solid. "What we were predicting when we made these investments in the cable companies is now a reality," he said.
According to Armstrong, AT&T is fulfilling the plan it set out when it began its cable acquisitions and partnerships. The first step was the build-out of infrastructure. Today, 51 percent of TCI's plant is upgraded; by the end of 2000, about 85 percent will be finished. The rollout of multimedia services will start with the rollout of the DCT2000 set-top converter from General Instrument, Horsham, Pa., as well as a product from a second supplier that AT&T hopes to add in 2000. Armstrong said the speed of the large-scale service rollout will depend on "price elasticity" -- what people are willing to pay vs. the cost of providing services.
Not all of AT&T's news is good, though. In addition to well-publicized open access issues, the company has been unable to finalize a telephone joint venture with Time Warner, Stamford, Conn. The problem, said Armstrong, is that the relationship between the two companies changed when AT&T agreed to buy MediaOne Group, which owns about 25 percent of Time Warner Entertainment. Armstrong said it was uncertain whether the deal would be able to close because of the fluidity of cable customer attribution rules, which control how many subscribers a cable company is allowed to have. Once those rules were decided in AT&T's favor, Armstrong said, negotiations on a new deal began. "As soon as those things happened, we sat down and started discussions," he said. A deal was likely around the time that the MediaOne deal will close, he said.
Fixed wireless is gaining an increasing profile among service providers, and AT&T is no exception. The company has 30 MHz of wireless spectrum covering about 65 percent of the country. Ten of that 30 MHz was reserved for fixed wireless applications, Armstrong said, though he would not specify markets.
The bottom line -- that AT&T is a company in transition -- is emphasized by the shrinking percentage of AT&T's revenue represented by long distance. In 1998, long distance represented 75 of the company's business, Armstrong said. That number will shrink to 59 percent this year, 51 percent next year, and 25 percent in 2004. The reasons, he said, are the commodity nature of long distance and the percentage growth of other AT&T products. For instance, in 2004, broadband will represent 20 percent of revenue. |
