First Look: AT&T U-Verse with GigaPower

[LER]

I'm proud to say I'm one of the first people to get AT&T's new U-Verse with GigaPower service in the nation.

This is 300 megabits/second in both directions, delivered via Fiber Optic Cable to the premises.

AT&T is pricing this at an amazing $70/month (Guaranteed for 3 years) if you let them use your internet history and search history for targeted ads.

So far I'm impressed with the service, I can get 135 meg down and 200 meg up, with a laptop gigabit card connected directly to the AT&T NV589 Gateway.

Oh, and AT&T is promising GigaBit speeds in Mid-2014 at the SAME price.

They add an ONT (Optical Network Terminal) on the outside of the house that translates from the fiber to Cat5e/Cat6 Ethernet which is what connects to the gateway.

Then they have the aforementioned Motorola NV-589 Gateway device on the inside of the house which brings the internet and (if you have it) TV to you.

In my case, their radio is single band, and I wanted something better, so I upgraded my router to an ASUS RT-AC68U router that does 802.11ac as well as 802.11a/b/g/n.

Putting AT&T's router into a Passthrough mode takes a few steps that are nicely laid out on the AT&T Forums.

What you need to do is put your Routers MAC address into the PASSTHROUGH page on the AT&T gateway, and set it to DHCPS which has the AT&T Gateway assign the PUBLIC address it gets to your Router's WAN side. This makes things like DynDNS work.

attached are pictures of the AT&T Power Box, The AT&T Router, my ASUS Router, and the ONT.

 

[Ilya]

AT&T is pricing this at an amazing $70/month (Guaranteed for 3 years) if you let them use your internet history and search history for targeted ads.

What's the full price, if you don't?

How stable and reliable is the service. Did you have any problems so far?

 

[Jimbo]

Oh Joy, can't wait to start putting these in ...

Sme of the guys have been doing the ONT's for quite awhile now and the 589 we've been using for awhile now, so it's the OTN and the new router thats doing the trick of getting the very high speeds.

The highest I have done so far is 80mbbs, but thats without the OTN as I don't do the fiber side of things, at least yet.

 

[LER]

Full price is $99/mo without a price guarantee.

I've had one day where they had network issues, aside from that it's been VERY solid.

I love it.

 

[lern4483]

Full price is $99/mo without a price guarantee. I've had one day where they had network issues, aside from that it's been VERY solid. I love it.

Is that just in your area???
I don't have Uverse fiber to the home.
Some new communities in my area have that.
I'm not one of the lucky ones

 

[LER]

This is JUST in the Austin, TX area for now.

 

[Ilya]

I just checked with AT&T and the highest speed they can offer me is 24 Mbps. And they want more than $60 for that!

 

[LER]

Yeah, unless you are lucky and live in the Austin, TX area, U-Verse Internet is slow. The uplink side is pitiful

 

[Ilya]

I hope they can roll out the fiber-to-the-premises service nationwide soon!

 

[digiblur]

I just checked with AT&T and the highest speed they can offer me is 24 Mbps. And they want more than $60 for that!

They can offer 3 megabit to me and the Uverse box is around the corner.

 

[Ilya]

They can offer 3 megabit to me and the Uverse box is around the corner.

3 megabit U-Verse??? My old DSL is faster than that!

 

[LER]

That's sad -- the cable must run a real squirrely route to your house, Travis.

 

[jevans64]

Is the data cap still 250 GB/month? If so, you'll just reach it faster.

 

[LER]

The cap is 1TB/month, IF they enforce it.

 

[plexi50]

Hi LER:

I have the same router and Gigapower here in Austin, but I cannot figure out the right way to configure the IP addresses, etc. Could you provide the steps or a link to them? Thanks for your help.

 

[LER]

http://forums.att.com/t5/Equipment/...isco-WRVS4400N/m-p/3859323/highlight/true#M19

Also, where are you in Austin, some of this is easier to do in person....... I live out in Hutto, but work in NW Austin (Riata), and could come out.....

 

[ChetK]

I have had this the same amount of time that you have LER. I was the installer's first customer to upgrade to GigaPower. Live in Round Rock.

I have noticed that I don't get anywhere near 300 Mbps even when connected directly to the at&t router. What gives?

 

[mike123abc]

Most likely the AT&T peering points do not have the capacity to deliver the 300Mbps to the rest of the internet. You could probably talk to LER's house at 300Mbps (or others in Austin).

 

[ChetK]

Most likely the AT&T peering points do not have the capacity to deliver the 300Mbps to the rest of the internet. You could probably talk to LER's house at 300Mbps (or others in Austin).

So, what I think you're saying is that I now have a higher speed internet than most of the content out there, so I should not expect to get much more than 100 Mbps anyway?

I don't know, I've seen YouTube videos of people using Google Fiber and getting 1 Gbps on Speedtest.net. I'm lucky to get 80 Mbps when I supposedly have a 300 Mbps connection.

 

[mike123abc]

Rest assured you have 300 Mbps to the press release... For AT&T to really get this going they are going to have to improve their peering connections... It takes a lot longer to get that done that to turn up the speed on the local fiber which probably already has the hardware in place for 1gigabit and is simply capped at 300Mbps. These peering issues are probably why they limited it initially to 300mbits, it would be very obvious if they claimed 1Gb/s and delivered 80Mbps.