BOSTON--AT&T will have no problems doing multiple streams of high-definition (HD) video over its U-verse network at scale, Jeff Weber, vice president of products and strategies at AT&T operations, asserted in a speech here at the VON show today.

Jumping right into the issues that have dogged his company’s video delivery efforts over its fiber-to-the-node architecture, Weber said the issues of delivering HD and scaling U-verse are “off the table” in his mind. In the Q&A session following his speech, he added that while AT&T will continue to look for drivers that would require a fiber-to-the-home network, HD is not such a driver. Weber also stressed the advantages AT&T derives from having an all-IP network.

“Can we really deliver the kind of service set we talk about over several thousand feet of copper into the home?” he said. “Having an all-IP network takes some of that bandwidth discussion off the table. 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 says it will soon be able to do “2-plus” channels of HD into the home, using VDSL 2 to most customers and bonded copper pairs to those beyond the loop reach of that technology, Weber said after his speech.

“Customers are very satisfied with what they are seeing from us, and we expect that to continue,” Weber said. “The question is, what is ahead of us? Is high def going to drive bandwidth in a way that causes us problems? The answer is no. Having an all-IP network helps, and having a switched video network helps even more.”

As other AT&T executives before him have stated, compression plays a key role in AT&T’s strategy. One of its compression vendors, Scientific-Atlanta, said last week that its MPEG-4 compression has gotten HD channels to as low as 4 Mb/s.

“We already have a very significant take rate on HD,” Weber said. “I don’t have the numbers on this, but I believe our take rate is the highest in the industry. We are certainly beating cable in that space. We are going to 2-plus channels in the near future, and we have plenty of bandwidth to do that. We have seen significant advancement in encoder technology, and a combination of that and a switched IP network essentially render this question moot. We certainly have execution ahead of us. But the question of whether it can it be done -- that question is behind us. In terms of HD and the bandwidth associated with HD, we have an answer for anything our customers can ask us for there.”

AT&T is also convinced any questions of its ability to scale the service are in the past, as it approaches its year-end goal of adding 10,000 subscribers a week, Weber said.

He told the crowd he would “spend a minute or two not answering” the question of whether AT&T will buy a satellite company, adding that whatever the company acquires will not disrupt its focus of keeping IP at the core of its network.

Weber admitted he doesn’t know exactly what the business models are going to be for the on-demand, ad-supported, socially connected, mobile and global services that lie ahead. Just since AT&T announced its plan for U-verse, the video world has changed dramatically, with Web-based video, video iPods and the rapid spread of time-shifting technology, he said.

“What the business models are going to evolve to is not really clear – no one knows,” he said. “Time-shifting and place-shifting continue to change customer behavior, and how advertising messages get delivered--or more importantly, how they don’t get delivered—are all in this pot being shifted around on business models, which will take time to sort out. This is likely to happen in fits and starts. We believe that having flexibility around infrastructure and business models will be critical, and having an all-IP infrastructure is what gives us that flexibility.”