Dec 11, 2003 12:00 PM,

AT&T launches more local, DSL markets

By Kevin Fitchard

AT&T accelerated its local voice and DSL rollout today, announcing that it is adding southern California and three new states to its local services footprint and deploying DSL in three new Midwestern markets.

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AT&T will now compete over local service head-to-head with Verizon Communications in the country’s second largest market, Los Angeles, as well as serve customers statewide in Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, bringing AT&T’s total local voice footprint to 24 states. For DSL, AT&T announced it is deploying Covad’s line-splitting services in Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin, bringing the total to 11 states served by AT&T DSL.

In a separate announcement AT&T CEO David Dorman today unveiled an ambitious voice over IP business and consumer initiative, which will make packet voice services available to residential customers in 100 markets by the end of the first quarter (AT&T to expand VoIP). The VoIP services require a broadband connection and despite AT&T’s aggressive rollout of DSL (it was launched in 11 states since this summer), the footprint won’t be nearly large enough to cover its VoIP service area when launched next year. The carrier, however, said it would make the VoIP access agnostic, allowing customers to use any broadband provider to connect to the AT&T network. But AT&T Consumer Senior Vice President Kevin Crull said AT&T would be pushing its own broadband deployments in order to serve as many VoIP customers as possible with AT&T’s own DSL service. AT&T has announced it plans to fill in as quickly as possible the remaining 24 states in its 35-state local footprint, which will encompass the majority of its VoIP service territory, Crull said.

"We would certainly prefer to use our own DSL to service VoIP customers," Crull said. "We’ll continue to roll out DSL as fast as we can to meet our VoIP footprint."

AT&T also announced it is trailing local services in 11 more states, meeting its promise to have 35 states either served or undergoing tests for bundled voice service by the end of 2003. .