U-verse comes to Chicago suburbs

What U-verse lacks in bandwidth capacity, it makes up for in interactive features. These include up to 384 video and music channels and the ability to record four different shows at the same time from the TV, PC or any Web-enabled device, including mobile phones. Through U-Bar, customers can also customize their TV screens with favorite channels and scrolling information, much like on a Web site. The IP voice aspect of U-verse that AT&T launched in Detroit last week will also eventually be available here, although Mitchell would not say how soon.

“It is a lot of really neat features that I think we have that our competitors don’t have,” Mitchell said. “It is IP-based, so at the end of the day, whatever you can do on your computer, at some point, is probably not out of the realm of possibility…This is not even close to a me-too product. I think this is a leapfrog in how the product is delivered and the technology and the interactivity.”

In the Chicago-area markets, Mitchell anticipates its entrance will offer consumers a viable alternative to cable, which has increasingly been dipping into AT&T’s bucket of phone subscribers. Comcast has not said it will change its pricing, which tends to increase significantly on an annual basis, however, the company pointed out that in Michigan and Indianapolis, where U-verse has been offered for eight months, Comcast gains more new phone and Internet accounts than it loses to AT&T's TV service.

“Because [U-verse] is still so new, it hasn’t really had much impact on the cable operators or the satellite operators yet, in terms of them upgrading their services or keeping their pricing flat,” said Jeff Heynen, directing analyst of Broadband and IPTV at Infonetics Research. “In all their markets, they still undergo a ‘wait and see’ period to see exactly how many subscribers they take and then at that point start to react.”

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