AT&T (more properly SBC dba AT&T) is pushing a marginal service, their "U-verse" triple-play (Wikipedia article) in what amounts to lead gleaning from the tailings of a silver mine. The ugly questions are as follows :

• What is the cost for the land-line ?
• What is the true cost to AT&T for the service ?
• Where's the price comparison chart for the various DSL-type services offered by AT&T ?

I suspect that AT&T's profit on the U-verse bundle is in excess of 200% (two hundred percent).

The bunkum offer I recently received from them said "$89" per month after a discount of "$41" good for two years (24 mos.). Then I went looking for the gotchas :

• The Internet speed tier called "Elite" (3-6 Mbps down, .5-1 Mbps up per Wikipedia) was part of the offer;
• Internet service had a six dollar ("$6") equipment (?) surcharge;
• There's a data cap of "250 GB" (two hundred and fifty gigabytes) per month;
• Other fees may apply for wireless (micro-cell) and broadcast TV services.

Open questions :

• When is the next major expansion of AT&T's U-verse ?
• Or are they content with cheap infill ?
• Do they have upgrade plans from FTTN(ode) to FTTP(remises) on a general basis ?
• Or what about upgrading from twisted-pair (UTP) to co-ax to get to 100 Mbps (hecta-megabit / sec.) ?
• Is Verizon going to continue the roughly three year hiatus (since March 2010) on major expansions of FIOS  (Wikipedia article) ?

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P.S. I'm a techie with a crazy quilt of training and experience. (My nerd bucket carries a Vaco A130-2 flat-bladed screwdriver even though I'm rarely dealing with RS-232 connections these days.) I've watched Ma Bell's, and the RBOC's, byzantine antics for more than thirty (30) years. The obvious constant over the years has been their Newtonian resistance to change (A body at rest ...). They fumbled their opportunity with ISDN and they are fumbling their last-mile opportunity with fiber. QED.

P.P.S. My thanks to the various communities and utilities that have blazed a trail of independent fiber deployments that don't break the bank and produce good returns (cash and quality-of-life).

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My post on "Gigacomm lameness..." doesn't have a hard source that says that AT&T is abandoning their customers. They are doing it in a more subtle fashion - a-thousand-cuts analogue that has been called "customer discouragement". One point is in the post above - charging too much for minimal service. Another is having a website that resembles a once flooded (*) maze and is in dire need of a cleanup. The third is pulling various regulatory tricks that include raising the cost of POTS from around $20 to around $30 and weasel wording their way to more price gouging.

• 'Vint Cerf: Internet competition has “evaporated” since dial-up'  (Ars Technica article, 8 Jan. 2013)

• AT&T said it will invest $14 billion in its networks over the next three years, with those dollars going into wireless, business services and the fiber-to-the-node U-verse product.

  (How much of the $14 billion will go into U-verse ? Either whatever crumbs are left over from wireless and business services or however much is needed as a sop to regulators.)

  The premise being that the remaining 25 percent of its customer territory will subscribe to LTE broadband, which comes at a much higher cost and has onerous caps that DSL access and AT&T phone lines do not have.

  "Here’s AT&T’s $14B plan to kill its copper network and leave rural America behind"  (GigaOm article, 7 Nov. 2012)

• History shows us, however, that promises made by regulated companies today often end up as foggy memories tomorrow. We have seen time and time again how dergulation [sic] given in exchange for promises results in a breach of the social contract.

  "Kentuckians Once Again Fighting to Keep Landlines"  (Community Broadband Networks post, 22 Feb. 2013)

• After state legislators collected more than $1 million in campaign donations from Time Warner Cable and AT&T, the General Assembly passed a law in 2011 that effectively barred communities from building their own networks. These corporations are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national organization that drafts business-friendly “model bills” to push a corporate agenda in statehouses across the country.

  "At the bottom of the broadband barrel"  (The News & Observer editorial, 28 Jan. 2013)

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* I leave it up to the reader's imagination as to the nature or source of the flood. Assuming potable water would, I think, be too kind to SBC dba AT&T.

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