AT&T CTO John Donovan talks to Dow Jones about AT&T's efforts to respond to last quarter's dismal DSL subscriber additions. While the company did add 46,000 subscribers total due to U-Verse, they actually lost 90,000 DSL subscribers thanks to the economy, competition, and according to Donovan - flawed execution. Donovan chats up his company's efforts to correct the losses with new promotions, and his fight against the "perception issue" that AT&T service is slower than cable. However, buried in the otherwise unremarkable conversation is yet another reference by AT&T that they're getting ready to unveil some type of new pricing/consumption model.

AT&T execs and lobbyists have quietly started hinting at metered usage in recent months, and have started dialing up the volume on the network congestion bogeyman rhetoric via their PR and policy outfits. The past six months has already seen Dovovan admit that a shift to metered usage was "inevitable", and that the company would begin testing metered billing this fall. The CTO makes it clear that AT&T execs are still mulling their options, but he raises a new possibility -- somehow forcing heavy users into using their connections more during off-peak hours:Raise of hands on who thinks any new pricing policy by AT&T results in lower broadband prices for anybody? According to Donovan, about 20% of AT&T network resources are gobbled up by 1% of users, though recent data from AT&T's network suggests that P2P consumption across the backbone is actually decreasing -- and most congestion can be handled by capacity upgrades. How exactly AT&T expects to police data consumption via tiers without imposing monthly caps like Comcast and Time Warner Cable isn't exactly clear -- (maybe peak, off peak broadband minutes?) but it is clear that the company has something cooking in the kitchen.