AT&T U-verse Icon Jeff Weber addressed long standing concerns surrounding the TV aspect of the company’s triple-play bundle at the VON show on Tuesday claiming advances in technology and more powerful software are helping bandwidth and scalability challenges.

    The AT&T vice-president said bandwidth is “really a non-issue going forward though hundred of channels, HD, DVR, VoD and high-speed Internet have become a baseline to compete today.”

    While AT&T’s U-verse only delivers one HD video stream per customer, meaning a customer can’t view one HD program while recording a second, Weber said the telco plans to pick up the pace in the HD delivery race “by going to two-plus HD streams in the near future and have plenty of bandwidth to do it.”

    Weber did not say specifically when this service enhancement would be available to U-verse customers. He stressed that technology is helping AT&T make the most of bandwidth, instead of having to ratchet up bandwidth to deliver additional features and programming.

    AT&T is employing the latest video encoding/compression technology, MPEG-4, to set the stage for delivery of additional HD streams. Its precursor, which most early TV deployers used, was powered by MPEG-2 wares, which supported fewer channels while devouring more bandwidth.

    “These significant advances in compression have rendered HD a moot point going forward,” said Weber, adding that the carrier has plenty of HD content to pump over the soon-to-be-optimized 25mbps copper connections to the majority of U-verse customers.

    But while Weber said bandwidth is not an issue, the company has been running fiber-to-the-home, instead of fiber-to-the-node, in all new builds. He cautioned, however, that AT&T provides the same set of service to customers regardless of the delivery media.

    The U-verse exec also attempted to paint a happy face on the company’s reported challenges scaling the package, which uses middleware from Microsoft Corp. The past challenges in missing its 2006 deployment scheduled were attributed to software issues.

    Sources who worked on the project said almost a year ago that a huge number of servers were needed to handle service scaling. While Weber was careful not to confirm that, he did focus on strides made in this area.

    “The scalability has improved by an order of magnitude and maybe two since we started out,” Weber said. “And the number of servers required for the number of customers we can out on, well, we’re past a lot of that.”

    On the TV evolution front, he said the feature it has rolled out that enables users to program the DVR in their home using a cell phone has been a big hit with U-verse customers. “The take rate has exceeded our expectation with the [average] customer using it to record eight shows a month.”