Internet TV: AT&T's Dubious Attempt

The most notable of these issues is the inherent lack of bandwidth the service can provide. U-Verse is the consumer package delivered through AT&T's Project Lightspeed technology, a service designed to bring television signals to regions across high speed fiber-optic backbones. The signals are then disperse to individual homes over digital subscriber lines (DSL).

DSL lines can run at a maximum speed of 20 megabits per second (mbps), a speed 10 to 20 times faster than what most broadband users currently receive. Most implementations of high definition media utilize the MPEG-2 compression format to encode data - a scheme that can require over 20 mbps for detailed scenes, essentially pushing the technology to its limits.

Cook responds, saying that AT&T’s content is compressed "down to about six to eight mbps for an HD channel stream," leaving plenty of room for more channels. Given that, and also noting that customers close to the central office (CO) would see upwards of 25mbps of service, users would conceivably have enough bandwidth left for Voice Over IP (VOIP) service on top of HD content.

Some analysts feel that while having such a capability would make U-Verse a very attractive service, AT&T’s offering is more marketing than reality.

"It is too ambitions to assume that most of their customers will get 20mpbs" says Albert Lin, Co-Head Director of Research at American Technology Research firm. Different regions across the U.S. vary in terms of infrastructure and even weather. These variables, Lin contends, are not favorable conditions for DSL.

"Not all Light Speed customers will get the same service," he says.

Even if each customer was to get speeds as advertised, they still wouldn’t have enough bandwidth, experts say. At the advertised rate, the service would only be sufficient to deliver only one HD channel. Problems would arise if more than one television was in use, or if a combination of television and intense Internet were in play.

"The reality is even within your own usage, you're looking at an infrastructure to do the bare minimum," Kaufman's Mitchell says.

This could explain why U-Verse’s initial lineup did not include HD content in its package of over 200 channels, including all three major broadcast networks. AT&T’s Cook states that because the product just launched, those channels are not yet available. However he adds that they are on their way.

Mitchell says the problem is not with timing but rather with a limit in the technology itself.