Back in July of last year, AT&T announced that the company s agreement with Dish Network to sell bundled TV, phone and broadband packages would be terminated at the end of the year. Not long after that, AT&T announced a partnership to market and sell co-branded DirecTV services exclusively starting in January 2009. These services will obviously be the most heavily marketed in areas where AT&T does not offer its own U-Verse VDSL2-based IPTV service.

AT&T insiders tell us that all of the AT&T stores and national dealers that sell wired services across AT&T’s 22 state footprint will begin selling DirecTV on schedule.

According to the source, all AT&T reps should be trained to sell DirecTV service by February 1. The source provides documentation suggesting that the bundle promos they’re working on for new customers will be stackable, could save customers up to 5 per year, and will end March 3, 2009.

AT&T’s move away from Dish Network was an interesting one, in part because it was the unofficial scrapping of AT&T’s Homezone effort, which was a DSL/Dish DBS hybrid set-top aimed at customers out of range of AT&T U-Verse. While AT&T is still supporting Homezone users, they’re no longer selling the service to new customers. It’s not yet clear if AT&T will offer a similar Homezone-style service in concert with DirecTV — who is doing some very interesting things with broadband video delivery.
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