AT&T Outlines $250 Million U-verse Plan for South Carolina

In what has become a common IPTV rollout refrain, AT&T Inc. once again has committed hundreds of millions of dollars for broadband infrastructure upgrades after a state passed video franchising legislation that obviates the need for the telco to negotiate deals with individual municipalities.

AT&T said Wednesday it plans to invest about $250 million over the next several years in fiber network upgrades, further broadband deployment and Internet technologies in South Carolina after the state signed into law more friendly video franchising legislation.

The company has taken similar steps in states like New Jersey and California, which previously adopted rules for state approval of video franchises instead of negotiating on a town-by-town basis.

While AT&T has decided on the amount of the investment in the project, it is mum for now on specifically what it will spend the funds on and what network architecture it will select. South Carolina is the first of the former BellSouth states to get AT&T’s U-verse video-driven triple-play bundle.

Perhaps the biggest question that was not addressed in the South Carolina announcement was whether or not the big-ticket project will include the use of GPON infrastructure, which AT&T announced just before NXTcomm that Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent had been chosen to provide the gear as part of new builds for U-verse.

AT&T did not comment on this question at press time.

Earlier this year, AT&T confirmed that it will spend $1.4 billion beyond its initial plan on the deployment of U-verse. While additional spending may not be popular for those signing checks, it’s likely well received by infrastructure providers in a U.S. industry with fewer Tier 1 telcos.

Just a few weeks ago, AT&T confirmed that it added Sun Microsystems to its growing list of infrastructure providers for U-verse, saying that the company’s array of servers and storage systems will be a key part of the telco’s video rollouts. 

On the U-verse deployment front, AT&T also did not detail U-verse deployment plans for other states from the former BellSouth territory. The region is largely rural, with a limited number of large cities, which drove it to provide video services to many areas via satellite as opposed to wireline networks.

AT&T did say that the planned network investment in South Carolina does not change AT&T's capital expenditure guidance for 2007 and 2008. AT&T said it is in the process of implementing the U-verse network in the Southeast and plans to provide a comprehensive update at an unspecified time later this year.

AT&T Inc. www.att.com

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