Comcast curtailing AT&T telephony deployments

Comcast will reverse AT&T Broadband’s aggressive telephony acquisition policies and implement its own corporate policy of trialing, then deploying voice-over-IP services, a senior company executive said today.

AT&T enlisted more than 1 million telephony customers using conventional constant bit rate [CBR] phone technology. Comcast will maintain these customers, but it won’t go looking for more, John Alchin, Comcast’s executive vice president and treasurer, said during a luncheon presentation at the Warburg Media Day in New York City.

“There is an element of cutback on telephony,” said Alchin, discussing Comcast’s plans to spend more than $2 billion to upgrade AT&T Broadband plant next year. “While we haven’t yet shared with you the details of the capital plans for 2003, you should not expect us to take the telephony product into a whole host of new markets. It will be a case of supporting the product where it is today without expanding.”

Alchin reiterated that Comcast is testing voice over IP in the Philadelphia area now and will move to that version of telephony “hopefully at some point in the not-too-distant future.”

AT&T Broadband’s telephony focus, he said, was also partially responsible for a subscriber drain that saw the multiple systems operator lose nearly 500,000 basic video customers.

“To some degree, there’s be a message historically that it was more important to grow telephony customers, telephony units, than it was to simply grow the video base, take care of your knitting and stick to what you know best in the business we’re all about, which is video and data network operations and video and data customers,” said Alchin.

Comcast also has a method of operation in place for the rebuild itself. Where AT&T Broadband was using “more than two dozen rebuild subcontractors,” Comcast will use the same two subcontractors it has in the past five years as it rebuilt its own networks.

“This is simplifying,” Alchin said. “It is making more cost-effective the whole rebuild effort and that’s how the job will be done.”

That job, he said, should not be as difficult as some might think.

“Having rebuilt on our own account some 175,000 miles, the prospect of getting 65,000 to 75,000 miles rebuilt for them is a manageable and predictable exercise,” he said.