AT&T “approaching” 10,000 IPTV installs per week

AT&T nearly doubled the weekly installation rate of its U-verse IPTV service in the third quarter, the company announced along with its quarterly earnings today.

After reporting an average of 5500 installations per week at the end of the second quarter, AT&T said today it has already “approached” its year-end goal of averaging 10,000 installations per week. At an investor conference last month, the company reported averaging between 7,000 and 8,000 weekly installations.

“We’re climbing the learning curve of video quickly,” said Rick Lindner, AT&T’s chief financial officer and senior executive vice president.

Lindner wouldn’t comment on recent speculation that the company might be considering acquiring its current partner, satellite video provider Echostar Communications. He did say that AT&T would announce any future satellite plans when its contracts with Echostar and DirecTV expire. “I’d expect that to occur near the end of this year,” he said. “End of this year, beginning of next year.”

AT&T reported 126,000 U-verse video subscribers at the end of the third quarter, a 147% increase from the second quarter. The service is now available in 33 markets.

The company is currently averaging per-home installation intervals of seven hours each, with lower numbers among more experienced technicians. “We’d like to get that down eventually to about a 4-hour installation, where installers can do two installations per day,” Lindner said. The company has instituted best practices across the operation to reduce installation times, including preloading software onto set-top boxes, a process that had caused delays earlier in the rollout. And AT&T expects those times to drop next year with the inclusion of intelligent network interface devices.

The cost to connect a home hasn’t changed much from its previous level of more than $300 per home, Lindner said.

Most U-verse customers opt for one of its top two tiers of video service, and nearly 60% opt for one of the top two broadband speeds. Forty-four percent of all of AT&T’s broadband customers now opt for 3 Mb/s service or faster.

When asked, Lindner also commented on an outage of U-verse service that occurred over the weekend, denying channels to some customers. The outage was caused by software loaded onto to the carrier’s operations support system Saturday night, he said. Service was restored Sunday. “It didn’t have anything to do with the basic platform or the scaling of the platform,” Lindner said.