AT&T plans a paltry DSL speed boost, Ad price only with a bundle

My grandmother once told me how Ma Belle used to bundle: a pleasant person would greet you, connect your call by name and give you the time and temperature - all gratis with your service. Of course, non-local calls were very pricey then and most people wrote letters instead. Anyway, I digress. Someone at AT&T seems to have a bundle fetish. Attractive new offerings are always advertised with pricing in “bundles”. And the bundles when bundled up amount to a bundle of cash. Now the latest is a small boost in DSL speed, and the price in ads is the price only offered as part of a bundle.

Quoting Broadband Reports: Though U-Verse users on very short loop lengths say their VDSL service is capable of great speeds, most users are distance limited, restricting their total bandwidth to 25Mbps. AT&T reserves the majority of that for video, leaving users with only 6Mbps of usable bandwidth — not particularly impressive for a “next generation” service.
While 6-10Mbps might be plenty for standard users, it’s still not going to be enough to battle DOCSIS 2.0 cable on the marketing front, much less DOCSIS 3.0. We’ve seen reports of U-Verse gateways syncing at nearly 100Mbps, though we’re talking about only 1,400 feet from the DSLAM. It seems that 25Mbps is working well at distances of 3,000 feet; distances higher than 5,000 feet are where the trouble starts.

Faster speeds are coming in ‘08 through pair bonding and compression tricks, and the company has hinted that they’ll let users that are closer to the CO operate at faster speeds. What’s more, the company today unveiled that they’ll be offering a 10Mbps/1.5Mbps U-Verse tier for $55 a month when bundled with U-verse TV.