AT&T gets Sun gear for IPTV

by David Masters

AT&T are generally regarded as being a bit slap dash when it comes to anything to do with organising, but there is nothing slap dash about the U Verse, AT&T’s very own vehicle that they hope will launch them into the IPTV market once and for all.

Although it appears that AT&T have not gone for the latest Sun system which includes Galaxy servers and storage arrays based on Opteron processors, that use the specialised streaming switch aimed at high bandwidth workloads, for media serving and of course IPTV. Instead AT&T will be bringing in their own sort of mashed up system of the streaming media stack, Sun X4600 servers, which will cover up to eight Opteron processors in a single image. That is the backend sorted out, AT&T will be using Sun Thumper X4500 storage servers, which have 24 SATA drives onto mother boards with two Otperon processor sockets. Sun will be managing the support and the systems that make up what will become U Verse.

So what will U Verse have to offer the consumer? 320 channels, 26 HD channels, which will eventually be available nationwide, at the moment the coverage is for 23 different markets in just eight states in the US, but plans the begin the national roll out in late 2007 and throughout 2008.

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