Here's the the latest scoop on AT&T's Lightspeed

In its former incarnation as SBC, the company that is now "the new" at&t has been pretty quiet about its fiber-to-the-home, 20-25 megabits per second "Lightspeed" trial in San Antonio.

Now, some more details are emerging. As Multichannel News (reg. req'd to read) reports today, at&t CFO Rick Linder says the current plan is to expand the controlled experiment within San Antonio during the first half of this year, and go national after that.

Linder says that while Lightspeed's previously stated goal of 18 million homes passed by mid-2008 is the current target, that target is flexible- probably in terms of delay rather than acceleration.

"To be honest, I think moving it significantly faster wuld be difficult just in terms of the residential requirmennts (within 4,000 feet of a serving node) and the ability to launch to the number of markets that we plan to launch during this time period, Linder added. 

Linder indicated that the pace of Lightspeed's national acceleration would somewhat depend on an assessment of the San Antonio buildout.  Linder added that the technology and service speeds are performing better than expected, and there are no major problems at this point.

"We're using this control launch to a large degree to not only stress-test the network and video platform, but even more so to refine our processes around customer service and operating systems and provisioning of services to the customer," said Linder.