AT&T Adds Sun to its U-verse of Equipment Providers

While the expanding costs of deploying advanced services such as IPTV may not be a big hit with those signing the checks, they can provide huge opportunities for infrastructure suppliers that may otherwise have a small piece of big project action.

In the two months since AT&T revealed it would spend more than $1.4 billion above original estimates to deploy its U-verse IPTV-driven service, three vendors have been named as suppliers for the ambitious undertaking, with Sun Microsystems Inc. the latest to join the effort.

Sun said it will provide AT&T servers to deliver video services as well as the storage systems it needs to support this core task. AT&T recently announced Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent will provide GPON equipment as part of U-verse builds.

“As we expand the scope of our U-verse TV offerings to include more video and multimedia services to more and more customers, it was clear that Sun was the right choice,” said an AT&T spokesperson. “The Sun servers and arrays will be rolled out in new deployments of IP-video super hub offices and IP-video hub offices in the AT&T U-verse network. The rollout will start by the end of the year.”

AT&T did not give a value of the deal for Sun or the two GPON-providing vendors.

Beyond physical transport media, servers are the workhorse of IPTV deployments. They fill roles including the delivery of basic IPTV, general content distribution, VoD, storage and network-based service features.

And while U-verse was slower than AT&T anticipated from a deployment perspective in 2006, the telco has introduced the offering in a slew of markets so far this year, with more anticipated in the coming months.

That’s positive news for vendors that gain or expand their roles in the IPTV project. That was especially the case for Ericsson, which has long been viewed as a mobile-centric vendor, but changed that perception for many when its GPON wares were added to the U-verse roster.

Alcatel-Lucent already was providing AT&T with critical integration services and related offerings for the rollout.

Alcatel-Lucent www.alcatel-lucent.com
AT&T Inc. www.att.com
Ericsson www.ericsson.com
Sun Microsystems Inc. www.sun.com

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