SBC claims its Project Lightspeed fiber build out is not delayed, even though it's now scheduled to pass 18 million homes six months later than initially intended.

SBC is now saying Lightspeed will pass those homes in mid-2008 instead of year-end 2007 as first planned when it announced the project last year. Lightspeed is the carrier's $4 billion to $6 billion effort to provide fiber- and DSL-based voice, data and video services to consumers and businesses.

"It's not falling behind," says SBC CTO Chris Rice at this week's Telecom '05 conference in Las Vegas. "What we've done is a controlled launch to allow us to get our processes in place to ensure that we can scale. This isn't a Lightspeed technology or IPTV problem; this is all about, if we're going to roll it out, roll it out on a very controlled basis initially to get all the processes in place…(and to) ensure that you're not going to have problems with servicing at that scale."

Rice says SBC has been quoting the new timeframe since April but it came to light this week during an SBC keynote presentation at the conference.

IPTV technology from Microsoft and infrastructure equipment from Alcatel is "all working as expected," Rice says.

Rice also took issue with recent assertions by analysts that the RBOCs will backpedal from IPTV due to the cost of trying to maintain video service parity with cable companies, among other factors.

"Have any of them ever watched IPTV," Rice asked rhetorically. "Probably not." Rice asserts that IPTV is at parity with cable service today. But IPTV today also surpasses cable in that it can do, for example, picture-in-picture not only on TVs, but in PDAs, cell phones, laptops and other portable devices. Cable also has to eliminate content or use extra channel capacity to deliver similar functionality, Rice says.