Of course, that's the million-dollar question as service providers, led by AT&T and Verizon, experiment and invest to find the right amount of fiber -- at the right price -- to deliver services to the home.

At this week’s VON show in Boston, the head of AT&T’s U-verse project said issues of scale and bandwidth are “off the table,” claiming the carrier -- close to deploying 10,000 U-verse customers per week -- is delivering more than enough bandwidth (about 25 Mb/s per home) via its fiber-to-the-node architecture.

“Can we really deliver the kind of service set we talk about over several thousand feet of copper into the home?” asked Jeff Weber, vice president of products and strategies at AT&T operations. “In today’s market, delivering broadband, VoD, many channels of HD and hundreds of video channels is table stakes, and we are doing that. It’s a non-issue whether we have the bandwidth to deliver what customers want because we are doing it today.”

AT&T is counting on continued compression advances (including 4 Mb/s-or-less HD signals) as well as advanced techniques such as VDSL 2 and two-pair bonding to maximize its copper loop.

Meanwhile, Verizon recently launched 20 Mb/s symmetrical data service over its fiber-rich FIOS network, upping the bandwidth-to-the-home game significantly.

At Telephony’s IPTV Workshop at VON this week, panelists noted that consumers have proved they will fill up any pipe you give them. But they also pointed to carrier architectures that deliver strong consumer service packages using just 2 Mb/s of terrestrial bandwidth (coupled with satellite-delivered video services) while noting that at least 15 Mb/s dedicated to video seems to be a more likely minimum bandwidth requirement.

In the end, however, bandwidth alone won’t define the winners and losers -- user experience will. “IPTV has a gold standard -- traditional television -- that needs to be met and surpassed,” said Deepesh Arora, director of applications and services testing for Ixia. “It goes beyond bits and bytes to the perception at the consumer level.”

Is your access network ready to not just meet but exceed customer expectations? That’s the question you need to answer.

E-mail me at rkarpinski@telephonyonline.com.