AT&T's U-verse Gets Ready for Ruckus

AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) is attempting an end-around on one of its U-verse service's biggest bugaboos: shoddy home wiring.

The carrier is about to start consumer field trials of its U-verse service using Ruckus Wireless Inc. gear to deliver HD IPTV streams over standard WiFi throughout the home, Light Reading has learned. The drive for AT&T, sources say, is to find ways to shave minutes, maybe hours, off some new customer installations by using 802.11n wireless connections instead of coaxial cable as the home's main video distribution medium.

There is a precedent of big carriers using WiFi to deliver IPTV in the home. (See Who Makes What: Telco Home Gateways.) Ruckus customers for WiFi IPTV distribution include Telia Company , Belgacom SA (Euronext: BELG), and Telenor Group (Nasdaq: TELN), to name a few. But this is interesting because it's AT&T's first reported use of something other than a wired connection in its U-verse homes, and it involves the new version of Ruckus's equipment, the MediaFlex 7000, which was designed to handle HDTV.

Ruckus says its 802.11n equipment can ensure the transmission of 30 Mbit/s to 50 Mbit/s of guaranteed throughput for streaming video throughout a typical 2,500 square-foot to 3,000 square-foot (230 square meter) home. (See Ruckus Raises 802.11n Stakes.) The MediaFlex 7000 device manual says it can support four to six MPEG-4 HDTV IPTV streams running at 10 Mbit/s each.

In Light Reading's test of Ruckus's gear last year in a real AT&T U-verse home, Ruckus performed well. That, of course, was just one case study, and deploying AT&T's U-verse has, in practice, been an exercise in finding just the right homes, with just the right wiring, at just the right distance from an AT&T VRAD. (See Raising a Ruckus With U-verse.) So the Ruckus solution won't be a catch-all solution, but analysts agree any help with speed of service is probably a good thing.

It's a hassle for customers to add new home wiring, says Heavy Reading analyst Adi Kishore. "That means moving furniture and hammering stuff into the wall," he says, all of which adds precious minutes to already hours-long installation times. "Most U.S. homes do not have Ethernet already installed, so AT&T has been using HPNA-over-coax to avoid new wiring. But sometimes the coax is old, or just poorly installed and can be a problem."

"The basic objective is zero-touch configuration," says Graham Finnie, Heavy Reading's chief analyst. He notes that every customer service call after the fact eats away at a carrier's profit margins in an already price-sensitive field. So fast install times are great, but adding WiFi video distribution had better not add to AT&T's support burden.

Next Page: A Total Home Solution?

Installs take time
As reported earlier by Light Reading, AT&T's survey data from December 2007 showed its newer technicians (those with less than three months experience) were taking an average of 6.4 hours to complete a typical U-verse installation. (See The U-verse Experiment.) More experienced techs were completing installations in about 5.3 hours, and the company, at that time, said its target rate for installations is "under five hours."

AT&T hasn't yet responded to an inquiry about its most recent U-verse installation times, and Light Reading couldn't find any more recent, publicly-released figures.



A total home solution?
One twist to using Ruckus in a U-verse home comes with AT&T's Total Home DVR service, which allows consumers to watch up to two standard-definition shows and two HD shows simultaneously, while playing back two HD shows and one standard-def show, simultaneously, to any TV in the home with a U-verse set-top. (See AT&T Completes Total Home Rollout.)

About a year ago, AT&T was specifying an available throughput of around 80 Mbit/s on a U-verse home network. This would allow for a fully-loaded Total Home DVR (doing all the things mentioned above), plus some data use, some voice calling, and a tiny bit of headroom for quality of service.

It's unclear whether Ruckus's gear could provide that 80 Mbit/s connection. But, as noted earlier, our sources say Ruckus will soon be an installation option, not a mandate.

Ruckus declined to comment on this article. An AT&T spokeswoman, via email, noted: "We regularly explore new technologies as part of our normal course of business, but we can't comment on the details of our technical plans or trials."

— Phil Harvey, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading