A regulatory filing has revealed that AT&T will be spending $500,000,000 more than expected on U-Verse deployment, while noting that the VDSL-based IPTV service would be available to one million fewer people by the end of 2008 than previously projected. AT&T now says that between January of '07 and the end of '08, they'll spend between $4.5 and $5 billion to reach 17 million of their customers.

That's the second time this year those deployment numbers have been revised, as the company dropped projected deployment down from 19 million to 18 million last May. Originally, when AT&T was still SBC, then-named "Project Lightspeed" was supposed to service 18 million customers by the end of 2007.

We won't get into "Project Pronto."

According to AT&T, the higher deployment cost is being added to the budget that will bring U-Verse into BellSouth territory, something we discussed with the company last month. AT&T has told us that the first BellSouth market to see U-Verse will be Atlanta, where the telco will launch the service before the end of the year.

Additional details on AT&T's U-Verse plans for Bellsouth territory will be revealed during an analyst conference on December 11. AT&T's third quarter results indicate they currently have more than 136,000 U-Verse customers, and are installing the service in roughly 10,000 homes per week.