The 25/2 Mbps Service Profile is the standard profile. It supports:

Bandwidth allocation:

• 2 HD streams
• 2 SD streams
• 10/1.5 Mbps Internet
• U-verse Voice and other services that don’t use significant bandwidth

A U-verse available service range of up to 3000 feet from the VRAD.

Some users have reported that a 0HD/5SD stream option is available sacrificing the 2 HD streams for 3 additional SD streams. This is not available through online ordering, only by calling in and it may be in limited areas or discontinued. UverseUsers forum: Total Home DVR released: 0HD/5SD

The 19/2 Mbps Low Profile is the extended range profile. It supports:

Bandwidth allocation:

• 1 HD streams (1 less than the 25/2 profile)
• 3 SD streams
• 10/1.5 Mbps Internet
• U-verse Voice and other services that don’t use significant bandwidth

A U-verse available service range of up to 4000 feet from the VRAD. (1000 feet more than the 25/2 profile) verify these service range numbers.

The Low Profile can also tolerate more electrical interference than the 25/2 Mbps Standard Profile.

Uverseusers forum 2 Questions about profiles 19Mbps Profile at 3400 feet

The current limit is 2300-2800 feet, depending on the wire quality. This distance is for the wire’s length, and not necessarily for a straight line from the VRAD to your house.

The new extended range 19/2 Mbps Low Profile available in some areas can extend the distance to 3000 to 4000 feet by sacrificing some features, notably the second HD stream. These numbers are approximate as we get more information about this new profile.

Add information about the distance limit as a function of wire gauge (26,28, etc.), profile (25/2 standard or 19/2 extended distance. Also keep a record of when the distance went into effect, preserving historical data so we can see the changes in distance over time. If the distances only apply to certain areas or markets, indicate that.

Guessing from AT&T’s actions, current profiles and information posted on this forum, it appears that pair bonding will only be used over the next few years to extend the service available distance from the VRAD so AT&T can sign up more customers.

AT&T could offer more HD streams and Faster Internet to customers today that are fortunate enough to be close enough to the VRAD to have synch rates of 40 Mbps and up. Since they are not doing that today, and Pair Bonding won’t be available everyone since not everyone will have two good pairs, it seems unlikely that pair bonding will be used to improve HD, Internet or any other service feature except for availability for people far away from the VRAD.

Uverseusers forum Pair bonding, faster internet and better picture quality

The new 2Wire i3802V iNid supporting pair bonding is soon to be trialed in the suburbs of Dallas. The iNid has 2 VDSL2 interfaces that will support pair bonding as well as up to 8 i38HG access points that will be connected to the iNid over HPNAv3 twisted pair.

Pair Bonding adds significant cost for AT&T. Each Pair Bonded customer uses 2 VRAD ports instead of one. They obviously use another pair.

The wiring to the premise is optimized in that not all the pairs to the premise go back to the xbox. Some premises that aren’t using the second pair won’t have it connected to the street cable that goes back to the VRAD. That saves costs by using, say a 50 pair cable to serve 30 houses. If each house used two pair - you’d need a 60 pair cable, but the next size is 100 pair. But since most houses historically had one phone and only a few had two, the 50 pair cable is plenty to have one phone to twenty of the houses (20 total pairs) and two phones in 5 of the houses (10 total pairs) for a grand total of 30 pairs leaving 20 pairs in the street cable as spares for defective pairs and future expansion if more houses get a second phone. Now Zzzziiippp into the present with VDSL2 pair bonding and there aren’t enough pairs in the street cable for everyone to have pair bonding, especially since the pair quality requirements for VDSL2 are much higher than voice. That means that for voice quality there might be 45 good pairs out of a 50 pair cable that has been installed for some years and has a few defects. That same cable may only have 30 good pairs that meet the higher quality requirements for VDSL2. Turns out some areas don’t have enough spare pairs to even add a second POTS (analog) telephone line! (That’s true for my home, MikeyT)

AT&T puts its bet on bonded VDSL2 Mentions 2x bandwidth in separate binder groups, but many will be in same binder group, yielding only 1.25x bandwidth (due to increased crosstalk within a binder group). Also mentions older neighborhoods (older AT&T infrastructure) may be very tight on extra pairs. “In most neighborhoods, there’s not enough [copper] for every home to have two pairs,” said Tom Starr, vice president of the DSL Forum.

Pair Bonding is a wonderful technology to solve some problems, but it is not a panacea - it has significant additional cost and won’t be available to everyone because there aren’t enough VDSL2 qualified pairs available.

Upload bandwidths are rarely mentioned so the uploads are likely estimations based on various sources.

Slide 9: Bandwidth allocation:

• 3 HD streams
• 1 SD streams
• 10+/2.5? Mbps Internet
• 2 VoIP lines

This will all fit in a 25-37 Mbps profile, under the reasonable assumption that continued improvement of MPEG 4 HD codecs reduce the HD stream bandwidth to 6 Mbps or less.

Slide 10: mpeg bitrate reductions. Current 10/2008 8-9 Mbps, Future ⇐ 6 Mbps. Slide 11: HSIA can burst into unused variable Bit Rate (VBR) video bandwidth. Slide 12: VDSL2 and bonded pair bandwidth. Single Pair: 37/3 Mbps at 2000 feet and 25/2 Mbps at 3000 feet Pair Bonding: 37/3 Mbps at 3000 feet and 25/2 Mbps at 4000 feet

FTTn/VDSL2 Capabilities and Economics (pdf slow download) by Richard N. Clarke Assistant Vice President AT&T -Public Policy 10-April-08

In the future, AT&T might deploy SEMs, a sort of micro-VRAD for 24 customers that connects back to a mother VRAD using Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). The SEMs can be used to increase bandwidth and/or distance to customers who are farther away from the VRAD.

The 7330 FTTN can have expansion shelves and the SEMs coming from them. A 7330 host can have 5 expansion shelves and probably 3 SEMs connected via GbE

Each expansion shelf can support 192 customers. The SEMs support 24 customers. It’s like a LT card in a sealed module. You can hang them anywhere from a pole to the side of a VRAD.

Expansion shelves are good I think out to 50km to the Host so I bet this is where and how AT&T will begin to saturate areas with VDSL and Uverse service. A little SEM information