What began as the nation's biggest planned deployment of IP-based services, having originally anticipated a customer base of 19 million homes, AT&T's U-verse high-speed TV/communications/Internet service appears to be scaling down its predicted uptake while scaling up its cost estimates.

In a recent regulatory filing, AT&T downgraded the availability of U-verse to 17 million homes by the end of next year, 2 million fewer than its spring forecast.

Last September, AT&T reported U-verse had passed the 100,000 subscriber mark. While this was an almost threefold increase from its June estimate of 40,000, at an uptake rate of 500 customers per day, the company might only make 210,000 by next year's end.

AT&T may need to expedite its rollout plan, which may be why it has raised its nationwide rollout cost estimate by $500 million, to between $4.5 and $5 billion.

AT&T finds itself playing catch-up to Verizon, whose competitive FiOS fiberoptic service had several months' head start. Last October, Verizon boldly estimated FiOS would reach the one million subscriber mark by the second quarter of this year.

By April, it beat that estimate in a sense, with 864,000 reported FiOS data customers and 348,000 FiOS TV customers, showing that not all customers are going for the full bundle. Still, Verizon was adding 141,000 new FiOS service subscribers that quarter - at a rate more than triple that of AT&T.

In June, Verizon reported it had officially broken the one-million-customer mark for the full FiOS buildout. It still expects to have spent $18 billion on this project by 2010.

However, the all-in-one services of the #1 and #2 telecom companies are only comparable to a point. AT&T's service works on fiber-to-the-node (FTTN), where a fiber optic connection comes within 3000 feet (914.4 m) of homes before switching to traditional copper line. Verizon's network is fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP), which links homes directly to the fiber optic backbone. Services associated with the connections also differ.

U-Verse has certainly faced its share of delays and trouble. In fact, the network was hit with a system-wide outage only two weeks ago, causing the 33 markets carrying the system to lose service entirely. The outage was blamed on a software change that reportedly had nothing to do with the basic platform or the scaling of it.

AT&T may have made this statement to dispel any speculation about the outage being attributable to a system upgrade to accommodate Microsoft's updated Mediaroom IPTV platform.