Is AT&T’s Project Lightspeed about its network upgrade or its PR function? It’s nice to see the media holding a phone company responsible for the promises it makes to Wall Street and to consumers.

In “Lightspeed’s Slow Start,” four BusinessWeek reporters offer a skeptical view of the viability of AT&T’s plans for offering video service. The magazine takes the RBOC to task for failing to launch the service in the promised 15 to 20 markets by the end of 2006 (in November it was available in only two markets) and chides the company for the flurry of year-end press releases that announced an additional nine markets launched. Despite this noise in the last 10 days of December, BusinessWeek points out that the company’s efforts were still “short of its original target.” And, as we noted last week, its U-verse TV service added no customers in the fourth quarter.

The story also questions the rationale of a long-term solution that supports only one HD video stream per household. According to BusinessWeek, AT&T’s vice-president and general manager in Connecticut admitted that homes farther away from its fiber nodes can't handle multiple high-definition streams. This sounds a bit familiar for those of us around in the early days of broadband competition between cable and DSL when the phone guys couldn’t deliver the speeds promised to their customers that resided a bit too far from their facilities.

In an e-newsletter this week, Telephony magazine’s editor at-large, Carol Wilson, weighed in on the skepticism. Though no conclusions were drawn in her editorial, she did point out that the AT&T perspective seemed “blurry.” We guess that’s because they are delivering their story via press releases at the speed of light.