AT&T has no plans to change its plan to use copper lines in addition to fiber as it expands its U-Verse network for an advanced Web, video and phone service. Ernie Carey, vice president of AT&T's Advanced Network Technologies, says the Chicago company's "fiber to the node" (FTTN) strategy lays fiber to neighborhood nodes, from which copper lines extend to consumer homes.

"We feel very comfortable that we have plenty of bandwidth for a long time," Carey tells the Reuters News Service in an interview on the sidelines of the NXTcomm communications conference in Chicago.

In its original 13-state territory, AT&T is on record as saying it expects to deploy U-Verse to 18 million homes using FTTN by the end of 2008, though it plans to use FTTP for 1 million newly built homes.

That ratio of FTTN to FTTP was unlikely to be different when AT&T deploys U-Verse in the former BellSouth territory, Carey tells Reuters. Previously, the company said it plans to spend $6 billion to $6.5 billion on the U-Verse network in its original 13-state territory by the end of 2008.