“AT&T Project Lightspeed and the Jedi Mind Trick”

Know your enemy department:

Nyquist Capital has an exasperated analysis of AT&T’s Lightspeed Fiber to the Node project. (BellSouth has agreed to be purchased by AT&T and its similar plan for gradual network upgrade will be subsumed by Lightspeed. When and if Lafayette gets an upgrade Lightspeed will be its name.)

This analysis contrasts Lightspeed with Verizon’s Fiber to the Home project. But the analysis he performs sounds very similar to the one we’ve heard here. It’s nice to occasionally be ahead of the curve.

In short, AT&T is deploying a very complex architecture with major limitations in the interest of saving money. The major problem with this approach is it offers nothing better than what the incumbent cablecos can provide. Cable’s broadband is faster. Cable customers don’t need to worry about how many channels a household is watching simultaneously. Verizon’s approach delivers a user experience equivalent to cable with the ability to radically surpass it by deploying new bandwidth hungry applications as they emerge.

Substitute LUS for Verizon in this paragraph and you’ll get a good picture of the emerging competitive landscape in Lafayette. And a very good idea why it is BellSouth that has been most frantic to prevent competition from LUS.