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/ 20.Mar.2008
Just for those of you who might stumble across this article later this year, it’s March 20, 2008 and I’ve replaced comcast in my home with AT&T U-Verse. I can say that I’m not sorry I left Comcast but I do think U-Verse still needs a lot of room to grow before it’s really for everyone. This review will be comparing mostly to Comcast cable (since that’s what I know best) so those wondering if U-Verse would be a good choice in comparison to DirecTV or something, you might get a few hints here but might also want to find another article to compare against DirecTV.
The good. The biggest reason we got U-Verse is the price. With Comcast, we were getting their basic digital cable with 2 DVR’s and HD. We also had the internet which I’m pretty sure was 6Mbs over 768Kbs. This cost us over $150 a month. AT&T, by comparison, costs us $120 a month for every channel they offer with HD and 1 DVR and a 6Mbs over 1mbs internet. After a few install troubles (I’ll cover those in the bad section) we’re saving another $20 a month for the next 6 months. So $100 a month is pretty good!
On top of the price, their HD selection is pretty good. Lots of HD channels. I haven’t noticed any HD channels that we didn’t have with Comcast. Also their SD (standard definition) channels are of better quality than the standard ‘analog’ channels offered by Comcast. Also, on the same line as the HD channels, I haven’t noticed any SD channels that Comcast offered that U-Verse doesn’t. The software seems to be pretty nice on the U-Verse boxes as well. We don’t have any times where we lose sound for a long time. No big freezes. Everything seems pretty smooth and much prettier than Comcast.
Moving on from the TV, the internet is also much nicer than Comcast’s offering. I’ve been wanting to switch internet providers since the day Comcast started filtering BitTorrent traffic and am SO happy to have an internet connection that doesn’t limit what I can do. I’m not a huge file sharer, but just under principle the BitTorrent filtering irked me more than anything. I haven’t seen any drops in speed. Running a speed test at SpeakEasy.net/speedtest has stayed very consistent. The only possible thing I could think about missing about Comcast’s internet is the ‘SpeedBooster’ thing Comcast used that gave you double your speed for the first 30 seconds or so of a transfer. All in all though, AT&T’s TV and Internet are both very nice.
AT&T might be a pretty good value and choice for TV and Internet, but it does still have some problems that I feel must be changed before U-Verse really succeeds. A lot of the things I’ll mention here have already been confirmed as ‘in the works’ and coming soon, so it’s just a matter of time. One of the biggest things that a lot of people have a problem with is the lack of HD streams, but even the total streams is too small for our house. We have 4 TVs and we get a total of 4 streams to our house at the same time. This means if everyone wants to watch TV at the same time and a recording starts on the DVR, that puts us over the limit and someone has to give up their TV. Also, 3 of our TVs are HDTVs and we only get 1 HD stream to our house. So only 1 of us can watch an HD program at the same time. This is supposed to be fixed by the middle of the year where we should get 2 or 3 HD streams and possibly 7 or 8 streams total. Those numbers are guesses and only rumored, but it has been confirmed that both HD and SD streams will be increased very soon.
The other temporary problem is only 1 DVR for the house. This won’t be a problem with a future update to the software because that 1 DVR will store everyone’s recordings and you’ll be able to record and stream your recordings from any other box in the house. This should also be coming by about mid-year and possibly around the same time as the stream update. I haven’t had to watch TV when it actually airs in a couple years now so this is really weird for me.
I mentioned the quality of SD channels in the good portion of this article but I never mentioned the HD quality. This is because the HD quality isn’t all that awesome. It’s not totally terrible, but it just looks very visibly compressed. I feel that even Comcast’s not so great HD quality was better than U-Verse’s.
Installation was very professional, but took about 11 hours. I don’t think this is a standard install time, because they had to install a new drop for a phone line since Comcast cut ours when we had digital phone service through them. The guys were really helpful and professional, it just took a long time. On top of that, after 6 days of decent service, the whole thing went out. No internet, no phone (we have vonage) and no TV. The DVR is actually a dumb box that gets it’s software from the internet, so we couldn’t watch any recorded programs at this time either. Customer service tried to be helpful but I had to spend a lot of time on hold and talking to people who really didn’t know what they were doing. It took hours to just get my account number since, for whatever reason, it wasn’t linked to my account. The problem ended up being some sort of electrical problem with the new drop they put in and since it has been fixed, everything seems great.
A small peeve about the internet is that the router they give you isn’t 802.11N, but I just hooked my newish belkin 802.11N router to it and get it to access point mode.
I think that’s most of the basics about my new AT&T U-Verse service. With time and improvements to AT&T’s infrastructure and software, U-Verse has the potential to be pretty great. Hopefully most of these improvements come before Verizon enters our area because the Fiber to the Home sounds so much sexier than Fiber to the Network. Time will tell. I hope this article helps out a couple of people on the fence.
UPDATE :: After the 3rd time AT&T had to come out. I spent a LOT of time on the phone with their tech support and got most of the upper management really interested in what was wrong. The original guy who installed it was out a couple more times and I have to say I was impressed with the level of support they gave us on a very personal level. I could tell they really wanted this fixed. It’s been 2 weeks now without an outage and the numbers on the router statistics page look much better now. I think they might have finally fixed the problem. It could have been something about some crossed wires on the pole that he thinks might have been shorting things out. I dunno. Whatever it was, it seems to be OK now. x=) I’m quite happy with the internet now that it’s actually working and the TV is ok for now. I really can’t wait for their ‘whole home DVR’ update that’s supposed to be coming in the next couple of months.
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4 Comments
Thanks for the review!
We had U-Verse installed on Saturday. It’s Monday and we are ditching it.
We’ve been with DirecTV a few years, with only minor annoyances. But what was appealing about U-Verse was the cost savings of bundling our TV service with our DSL, which has been with AT&T,
I’ll second what you noted about the installation being both professional and lengthy. I expected them to be in and out in a couple hours but the guy showed up around 8:30am and probably didn’t leave until 6pm. During that time our land line and internet were both down which was very inconvenient.
I instantly took a dislike to the new 2Wire modem/router when our print sharing failed to work. I logged in to the admin interface. They’ve got all kinds of presets to enable different games (though oddly enough, not WoW, the only one my kids care about), but none for anything like print sharing. Though I opened up all the required ports and rebooted everything a couple times and still nothing went through. I figured OK, well, I’ll plug my old Linksys router in and just use the 2Wire box as a modem/firewall. That got my print sharing working but the 2Wire box wouldn’t let me plug the Linksys in unless I put it in DMZ mode. Meaning I needed to have a firewall on my Linksys anyway.
Saturday night, I noticed the Motorola DVR was making a high-pitched whining noise. When it’s quiet you can hear it two rooms away. So now I was faced with having to replace a defective unit (best case), or shutting it off every night so it wouldn’t keep my family awake.
But the deal breaker turned out to be the single DVR. We’d pretty much been sold on the idea that the set-top box on our second TV would be able to record on the DVR. I was told at first it was coming “in a couple weeks”, but now they’re saying “by the end of the year”. Plus, since the set-top box doesn’t have any kind of storage at all you can’t do things like rewind and replay the last minute if you missed something. It’s really only good for live TV.
I am not very impressed with Uverse at all. At first, I was having issues with Comcast. My cable and internet seems to go down a lot last month. Then the next thing I remember, it was completely out. Then I noticed this weird looking grey box on my neighbor’s property. It looked like an AC unit, but it was marked with an ATT logo.
Last week, I decided to cut my cable and go with ATT Uverse. They installed my service the next day. The installation for 3 services took 8 hours to complete, and I had to take a full day off from work.
The internet was fine. I wasn’t surprised with the speed because it’s almost the same as Comcast internet. The digital tv service from Uverse was not that great at all. The HD channels and regular cable were fuzzy and sometime cutting in and out. I called ATT to send someone over the next day to fix this issue and they told me that no one will be able to fix it until 2 weeks later.
This was not what I had expected from Uverse. I asked my neighbor who also had Uverse if they had issues with their high definition channel. They too were also having issues with the picture quality. It was basically a joke compared to Comcast’s HD channels.
I called Comcast to reconnect my service and the rep was very helpful. She told me that all she had to do was restart my service with no extra fees. I don’t know how they did it so quick but my cable was on right away and it wasn’t Uverse. The rep also told me that they were experiencing outages in my area because of the unsightly ATT box. I guess this Uverse box was disrupting my cable service. Ugh! What a disaster.
I called ATT and told them to pick up the box they left here and they told me that I have to mail it. My experience with Uverse was infuriating. They false advertise that it’s better than cable. It’s a total BS. Never going to use ATT again ever!
if you think comcast is a good company your high I’m going t try uvers but I’m thinking so far dishnetwork prvides the best hd and channel line up
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