AT&T Launching New Service in Bits: Cable, Broadband Deal to Come Out Gradually, May Push Prices Down
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By Andrew D. Smith, The Dallas Morning News  Mar. 6--Today marks the beginning of a battle for cable TV and broadband Internet customers around Dallas and Fort Worth -- a battle that may mean sharply lower prices for all consumers.   AT&T Inc.
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AT&T Inc. said on Tuesday it will  launch a new Internet browser-based television service that  will allow subscribers to watch 20 channels, including Fox News  and the Weather Channel, on their computers.
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Providers don't yet offer set-top boxes that use CableCARD, which could spur competition.
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Expect mobile broadband access to be commonplace in the next couple of years. The technologies are here and so is the demand, but spectrum and cost issues remain.
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AT&T Inc.  said on Tuesday it  will launch a new Internet browser-based television service  that will allow subscribers to watch 20 channels, including Fox  News and the Weather Channel, on their computers.
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The U.S. Federal Communications  Commission this week hopes to do what Congress could not  accomplish this year -- help AT&T Inc.  and Verizon  Communications  get into the television business faster.
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Time Warner Cable says it will charge users based on how much data they transfer in an effort to control peer-to-peer traffic on their network, but the new pricing model could scare off customers.
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Time Warner Inc.&#39;s cable-television unit said it may start offering mobile phone service through an agreement with Sprint Corp.
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Cable provider's costly services, combined with its pricey stock, should give pause.
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Time Warner Cable will try selling consumers broadband service based on how much bandwidth they use, a move that could turn the home broadband pricing model in the U.S. on its head.In a trial planned for later this year in Beaumont, Texas, the service provider will offer four tiers of service at different prices. Customers who used more bandwidth would pay more.The details of the tiered pricing plan haven&#39;t yet been set, according to Time Warner spokesman Alex Dudley. The offer will only go out to new customers, he said.Some service providers charge different rates based on the speed of a service, but in the U.S. they typically allow each customer to send and download as many bits as they like in a month. Under that model, some subscribers who exchanged large files through peer-to-peer services reportedly have been cut off. Comcast, the biggest U.S. cable operator, has said it&#160;sometimes slows peer-to-peer traffic&#160;during peak demand periods.In some other countries, Internet users have long endured bandwidth caps. And Web hosting companies typically charge site owners based on how much data they exchange with visitors.Tiered pricing could help settle the ongoing argument over the fairness of certain subscribers and online content providers using up more network capacity than others, according to Ovum analyst Mark Seery. In fact, he thinks the whole industry will go down this path eventually.&quot;It&#39;s difficult to charge, appropriately, different customers if they have such widely divergent uses of bandwidth,&quot; Seery said. And trying to target one type of application, such as illegal peer-to-peer file sharing, raises political issues, he added.&quot;There&#39;s no justification for blocking legitimate uses of peer-to-peer,&quot; Seery said. &quot;The right focus is on who&#39;s using what [bandwidth] and what they should be charged for it.&quot;Many other transport industries, such as shipping, rail and courier services, charge different rates based on how much the customer uses, Seery said. Some have shifted to that system over time. For example, toll bridge operators once charged trucks based on the value of what they wanted to carry over, and U.S. railroads could arbitrarily carry goods from one customer and not from another, according to Seery. Neither model lasted.Time Warner operates in 33 states but is a relative underdog in the U.S. broadband industry, with 7.4 million high-speed data customers. Comcast has 12.9 million.&#160;
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The long-promised battle between U.S. cable and telephone companies has so far been more of an uneasy peace. Thanks to their duopoly over broadband Internet access, it may stay that way.
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(InfoWorld) - U.S. senators questioned Thursday whether members of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission plan to enforce merger conditions that AT&T Inc. agreed to in its December acquisition of BellSouth Corp. Democratic members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee questioned why FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Commissioner Deborah Taylor Tate issued a joint statement while approving the merger saying the FCC couldn't broadly enforce some of AT&T's concessions. "What I find difficult to understand is that ... you said that you do not intend to stand by the deal that was reached," said Senator Daniel Inouye, the committee chairman and a Hawaii Democrat. Martin and Tate, both Republicans, had protested a net neutrality condition, preventing AT&T from giving priority transmission speeds to its own or its partners' Web content for at least two years. The net neutrality conditions "very well may cause greater problems than the speculative problems they seek to address," Martin and Tate said in the statement Dec. 29. Martin on Thursday said he intends to hold AT&T to the net neutrality agreement, but he doesn't plan to impose those standards on other broadband carriers. "Since [AT&T] volunteered to do that, we would enforce that," he said. "That does not mean we were changing our policy." Martin also suggested another part of the agreement setting out wholesale rates for some data services may be unenforceable. "What is your legal authority as chairman ... to not enforce something you just did?" asked Senator Mark Pryor, an Arkansas Democrat. AT&T agreed to lower the wholesale special access prices for DS1, DS3, and Ethernet services available to some regional telecom carriers and large businesses, but not to large competitors. But the FCC's policy in the past has been that wholesale discounts should apply to all customers, Martin said. "That tariff actually has some components that I believe are illegal under the commission precedent," Martin said. "They can file [the proposed discount], but I'm not committing to approving something that would be in violation of our precedent. We don't allow for that kind of discrimination." But Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, a Democrat who pushed for conditions on the AT&T merger, noted that the FCC adopted the AT&T merger conditions on a 4-0 vote. "It's hard for me to understand why we can't implement something we adopted unanimously," he said. Senators also urged the FCC to work on ways to get broadband service to rural, inner city and poor areas. The FCC on Wednesday issued a report saying the number of high-speed lines in the U.S. increased by 26 percent during the first half of 2006, from 51.2 million to 64.6 million lines in service. The number of high-speed lines grew by 21 percent in the second half of 2005. Senators also pointed to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's latest study saying the U.S. ranks 12th in broadband adoption rate among industrialized nations. Commissioner Michael Copps called on Congress and the FCC to develop a national broadband strategy. He called the U.S. broadband adoption rates "woeful." "I am really worried that we can go into the 21st century and have a bigger digital divide in this country ... than we had back in the days of plain, old telephone service in the 20th century," he said. "This just isn't feel-good liberal theory -- we're talking about the competitiveness of the United States of America."
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The firm&#39;s new Internet calling plan is cheaper than traditional phone service and has more features. AT&amp;T has followed its recent announcement that it&#39;s not marketing new residential telephone service by
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AT&amp;T (T) is teaming with America's big cable TV operators to offer phone service over their broadband Internet lines, marking the telecom giant's first big move since it announced plans to abandon its traditional consumer long-distance business.
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AT&T Inc. T.N said on Tuesday it   will launch a new Internet browser-based television service   that will allow subscribers to watch 20 channels, including Fox   News and the Weather Channel, on their computers.
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An announcement that AT&amp;T would drop its prices for its VoIP CallVantage Service, its popular residential broadband phone service, from $34.
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AT&T wants to trim the deal's scope, The Wall Street Journal reports.