In my neighborhood, AT&T has moved into the full on “knock on doors and pitch the service” mode. They’ve hired a whole army of young door-to-door sales folks and are pushing it hard — and from the view out my door they’ve had some fair amount of success converting people over as there’s an AT&T van doing an install somewhere nearby every single day.

But the costs they’re incurring have to be huge — I had an install done, and for $0 cost to me i had two installers in my house for several hours plus a follow-up visit from an “expert” to show me how to use the remote control (REALLY!). Probably 7 man hours on my install (and I didn’t even have them bother with the upstairs box), and some of my neighbors were well over 10 hours.

The sad thing here is that (at least for my needs) the service isn’t really ready for prime-time — it’ll be at least until next year until they can offer two simultaneous HD channels (in the whole HOUSE not just at the set top level), and trust me, you don’t want to be in the middle of a show when the DVR starts recording in HD and the screen goes black and a msg pops up saying “another TV in the house is using your HD channel”.

AT&T is doing a “no obligation, no contract, try it free for 2 months” here in san diego — I’m going to be very curious to see how many of these expensive installs actually stick with the service given the limitations — my gut feel is that anybody who has an HDTV and is used to the 2 tuner set tops cable offers is not going to make AT&T’s investment worth the while.

So I’d have to agree with your premise — especially when the landline investment isn’t offering any major improvement over what the cablecos are offering.