About One Million Users to Patronize AT&T IPTV

AT&T operations president and CEO John Stankey revealed the operator is expecting to reach one million IPTV customers within the next week, reaching its predicted year-end target, reports Light Reading. Stankey also said AT&T will continue to add new elements to its U-verse IPTV offering, including adding 'more internet-like capabilities'. Elsewhere AT&T has begun testing femtocells in employees' homes with plans to conduct a city-wide test in the second quarter of 2009. Stankey said AT&T is looking at femtocells that provide full 3G speeds. In another development, the CEO explained that the company would continue to add new capabilities to its U-verse IPTV offering, including more high-definition channels and greater HD streaming capacity, according to Light Reading.

RGU at Time Warner Cable Still Crawls

Although the cable industry expects to hold its own in an economic downturn, Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE: TWC - message board) continues to see a slower uptake of new service subscriptions, the MSO's president and CEO, Glenn Britt, warned. Britt, speaking at the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York, reiterated that Time Warner Cable saw RGU (revenue-generating unit) growth slow dramatically in October versus the year before, as consumers started to close their pocketbooks. Britt said. "Some weeks are certainly better than others, but it's certainly slower than it was a year ago." He noted that he couldnt't "remember an [economic] environment like this during my career." The good news, Britt said, is that cable offers "services that people are not going to disconnect easily or quickly." If he had to size up the offerings, he expects video to "remain very strong," because "history would say people watch more TV during bad times."