Review: AT&T U-VERSE

[aristotlewilde]

My DirecTV contract runs out 10/1. I am officially going to be out of contract for at least one aspect of my life.

Uverse reps have been calling me non stop to sign up. I am SOOOOOOOOOOO tempted, but the one DVR thing kills it for me right now.

The funny thing is that all of the people who call to sell me, initially say they offer the Whole House DVR, but then I prompt them to check and of course they don't.

How can they have reps selling something that they know nothing about??

The mini-rant is over. I want this service.

 

[mikesul]

U-Verse install

I am going for the U400 package install on 10/9. Currently have Comcast internet and dig tv. ATT has told me I will get 10/10 service on my internet, which is one reason I am switching. The whole house DVR I'm supposed to get is another. I have been watching the ATT trucks in my neighborhood for the last year and a half working many days/hours getting ready for the U-Verse in my neighborhood.
I hope it turns out as well as I expect, will post when I am completed.
Just jumped on to this Forum today and have at least learned to ask/demand CAT5e cabling where needed, learned something already!
Thanks!

 

[mikesul]

U Verse DVR

I forgot to ask, has anyone cloned a larger HD into their ATT DVR? I want more capacity and have done the same thing to my TIVO.

 

[rad]

ATT has told me I will get 10/10 service on my internet, which is one reason I am switching.

I don't see anywhere on the AT&T site that says they offer a 10Mbps upstream speed on Uverse. The fastest I see is a 10/1.5Mbps service so you might want to double check that speed they told you you'll get.

 

[Neutron]

This sucks. AT&T Uverse is available in the city 8 miles from us, but not in my city.

 

[lern4483]

I am going for the U400 package install on 10/9. Currently have Comcast internet and dig tv. ATT has told me I will get 10/10 service on my internet, which is one reason I am switching. The whole house DVR I'm supposed to get is another. I have been watching the ATT trucks in my neighborhood for the last year and a half working many days/hours getting ready for the U-Verse in my neighborhood.
I hope it turns out as well as I expect, will post when I am completed.
Just jumped on to this Forum today and have at least learned to ask/demand CAT5e cabling where needed, learned something already!
Thanks!

We are neibors! I live in Coral Springs. I have had Att for about a month.
Make sure they give you a brand new hookup. Run new lines. Dont let them use existing cable\sat lines. They will try to do this. Its easier for them.

Service is good. Not so when I started out. Tons of pixelation issues. That seems to have gone away.
I have tv\internet. I must say I very please right now.

When they get more HD ill be really happy. But not bad so far.

 

[Ben Kidman]

Is NOT in my area yet till beginning of the next year. I have dish now , wanna try them too. My contract expire by summer next year might gives them A try ,because I have DSL service and lan-line from the A & T.. So would be the whole package. Since they gonna drop the Dish network. Love the whole house DVR that’s real AWSOME.. Just wondering they DVR use external hard drive friendly or what?

 

[mkatts]

I'm scheduled for install on Oct 16th. As an employee of a company owned by AT&T, I get the employee discount. I can get U400, Elite INET and u-voice for $69 a month!
I am going to run it side by side with DirecTV for a few month. Does everyone still have issues with VPN? There are 5 other engineeers I works with that have it and have not mentioned VPN issues.
What type of VPN are you using that you are having issues?
IPSEC? If to are you using TCP or UDP?
Does anyone know if AT&T's RG is NATing to a private ip?
If so do you know if your company has NAT-T enabled on their VPN concentrators?
I assume that an SSL citrix session should work fine correct?

 

[Leah]

Thanks for detailing your experience. The U-verse installer was here last week Thursday and found some problem with the old wiring in the street and said they would have to dig up the street. Friday another guy called and said it was OK and he would be over in 15 min to proceed. After about an hour I saw him sitting in his truck outside on the phone. After a while I looked and he was gone. He never came back or called to tell me anything. I called AT&t to find out what's up? They said he was unprofessional and had left an incomplete confusing report. They would call me Monday to set up an appt. No one called until Friday and left a message that the installer would be here Thursday. I'm glad that they gave me time to read this forum and see what it could be like. It just doesn't seem worth it even though I'm not that happy with Dish and like some of the features of U-verse. We have At&T phone and internet and I wanted faster internet but I think I'll just live with it and forego the hassle you went through. What other options are there for TV and internet? We have AT&T internet PRO for $30 now. We don't have HDTV yet. We pay 77.40 for Dish each month so we could save about $20 a month. Does anyone really think U-verse is worth the hazzle?

 

[NutFlush920]

I currently have DirecTV for television and Road Runner for internet. I want to dump the Road Runner for Uverse DSL and love my DirecTV. I can't just get Uverse DSL apparently so I plan to get the TV and DSL deal then cancel the TV part a few weeks after install which should allow me to keep the Uverse DSL and DirecTV. I just have a couple of questions that I hope can be answered.

1. How does the Uverse enter the home? Can Uverse use the coax that is currently in use by Road Runner? Cut into the RG6 line outside the home?

2. My home is currently not wired for landline as my wife and I use cell phones. After remodeling, I never rewired for phone. Can Uverse use the existing RG6 in the home for each receiver and the DSL modem? I have 2 lines to each room still because I just upgraded to SWM a while back and only need 1 line to each DVR.

3. From some of the pictures I have seen of the modem, it appers to also function as a wireless router with 4 eithrnet ports. Will I no longer need my 4 port wireless router?

4. Are there any other concerns that I should have doing this?

Thanks in advance for all your help.

 

[MadoneGuy]

Looking for new service for my new house

Great thread and thanks for all the info on uverse. I am moving into a new house at the end of the month and am looking into uverse. The cons of whole house DVR not being available and also one one HD stream has me a bit hesitant but I still think I am going to order it up.

The ATT rep today tells me that Total DVR is only available in San Francisco but will be rolled out to all uverse subscribers in November. I am going to bet on that and hope I only have to go 30 days with a single TV having DVR access.

They also had NO answer for when more than one HD stream will be available. ATT did tell me that you can record one HD stream on the DVR and watch another HD stream simultaneously. Can anyone confirm this? I have a hard time understanding (believing is more accurate) that you can have 2 HD streams but only one to the TV endpoint. I am no tech guru but this seems odd e.g. incorrect. Bueller??

Lastly I asked them about the VoIP component and whether or not they allow for IP voice endpoints such as Cisco/Polycom/Linksys/ or do they simply provide analog POTS ports via the NID. The answer was "you can use your regular phone stuff and not sure about using other IP devices". Sure would be nice if we didnt HAVE to use old crappy dated analog voice sets when I have a pile of Cisco phones in my office at work!

Anyways, thanks again for the great info!!

Madone Guy - Live Strong!

 

[RoswellGA]

J.D. Power and Associates Reports: AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS Lead Regional Customer Satisfaction Rankings Among Cable, Satellite and Internet Television Service Providers

Thought you all would be interested in knowing that Uverse has been rated #1 by JD Powers in customer satisfaction. The only region in which Uverse did not rank #1 was the region in which it has not yet launched.

 

[LER]

As a follow-up to my original post, here's my current speedtest (10/1.5):


I've been relatively happy with it, and the VOIP seems to work fine most of the time.

Since we had the line from the demarc to the Pole in my yard replaced, the errors are mostly gone.

 

[machine906]

The copy protection that flags all NFL and NCAA football games (on all channels) will prevent recording to a DVD recorder. I've had a Toshiba recorder for over a year and I like to record the games I will watch years from now and I can't since switching to U-verse. I can record just about everything else (everything else I have tried) without an issue, but receive a big red onscreen warning about not being able to record in video mode when attempting to operate my recorder with the protected show playing or being recorded by the DVR.

It would have been nice if AT&T included this little sidenote in their literature.

 

[tswan]

Uverse fast-forward question

Hello everyone, I'm brand new to these forums.

I'm currently a Time Warner customer and I've grown a bit tired of the Mystro software. When they switched to Mystro they removed one feature that was especially painful to me. They removed the ability to jump 15 minutes forward or backward while viewing a recorded program. The only way to move through the video in Mystro is to use 1 of 3 fast-forward (or rewind speeds). This is a real pain when you want to jump to the last 30 minutes of a 2 hour program.

I have spent some time on the internet trying to figure out what fast-forward capability the Uvers Total Home DVR offers, but it's not obvious. Does their DVR permit this kind of large time jumps? How about other providers (Dish, etc?).

I got into the world of DVR's with a home-built Linux MythTV box. I miss all the features, but the convenience of having tuners in the box that can decrypt the encoded signals was just too appealing so I switched to the Time Warner DVR a few years ago.

I look forward to your answers...thanks.

 

[adict_drek]

Hey everyone, I am a U-verse installer and just saw this thread thought I would chime in and see if I could help with some answers. I also worked as a DirecTV installer and dive way more into this stuff than they trained us.

First thing, please dont blame the company for some of these irresponsible, lazy, and disrespectful installers. They have been pumping a lot of new techs out and new managers that aren't prepared for a job like this. The training they give us is extremely comprehensive but they are pulling people off the street to learn all these complex ideas in a couple of months. If you do have a problem dont be afraid to ask for the techs ID number and supervisors number and report them. They are required to tell you if you ask. They've been firing a lot of these techs but its not easy to find them all. As with DirecTV, I tell all my customers to question everything a tech does and to ask questions. But enough of all this on to the technical aspect.

All set top boxes can be run on either Cat 5 or coax cable. I like to run new Cat 5 cable because it is a much more reliable cable and can run much faster than coax but yes the existing coax wiring can be used. That is if it passes testing(If the installer tests it) and there isn't a million splitters in line. For home run going to the RG (modem) both types of cable can be used as well but I personally only use Cat 5 and would recommend that to everyone else as well.

The RG does transmit wireless but as for the 4 ethernet ports on the back of it, those are for installing either the set top boxes or computers. If you would like to use them as a router make sure you tell your installer so he can make arrangements to leave them available for you. I dont recommend using other wireless routers with this system as it may conflict with our signal and it is unnessary. If you do need some more ethernet jacks your installer can supply you with a switch for additional ports.

The whole home DVR update is coming. And it is pretty cool. It just recently came to our area and I havent had a chance to play around with it much but it is a really cool function. From what I've been hearing everything is on schedule. As for the large time jumps im pretty sure U-verse doesn't have a function where you can do that either. I believe it will jump ahead 30 seconds(same with DirecTV) but I am having a brain fart on the exact amount.

In my opionon the 4 stream limit with one HD stream is U-verse's biggest downfall but I've heard rumors that more are coming, possibly more than double, with more HD streams possible. I am in no way making any promises or official statements on that though. All recorded programs are seperate from the live streams so yes you can watch a recorded HD program and have an HD live stream going at the same time.

The VoIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocal, so to answer the question about being able to use IP based endpoints, yes you can use them. It works with both old anolag POTS telephones(which I would recommend keeping at least one on the line) and IP based units. In my personal oponion I would just keep the old POTS line for reliability, but you shouldn't have any problems with the VoIP as its a pretty basic operation.

As for recording games and other protected programs, I really dont know why think a company that works with all levels of the government would let you perform an illegal action on their system. I dont think they should be required to tell you such things either, in fact the broadcast explicitly states that it is illegal to make unathorized recordings of the program at the beginning.

 

[wbill2k]

the U-Verse is a joke...

I recently had U-Verse installed with my phone, cable, and internet all together in 1 package deal. Turns out, the dsl and phone service i had previous to this, the only positive thing i got was cable tv. My internet is garbage, i cant do half the speed i was able to d/l and u/l and tAT&T's Customer Service sux. Email me if any1 wants further details of this joke they are tryin to get everyone to purchase, Thanks......

 

[wase4711]

nice first post...

 

[CopyChief]

...In my opionon the 4 stream limit with one HD stream is U-verse's biggest downfall but I've heard rumors that more are coming, possibly more than double, with more HD streams possible...

Thanks for the detailed inside info. I thought U-Verse fairly universally had 2HD streams now?

I've been considering U-Verse for quite some time, and now with a new HD set I'm even less sure, with concerns about HD quality vs. my dish setup.

 

[wase4711]

its now 2 HD streams in Chicago land; as far a PQ is concerned, it will be more a product of your installer and the wiring then ATT itself..
remember, installation is free with no contract, so don't cancel your other services until you are sure you like it..
For me, it will mean saving 80 bucks a month, almost a thousand a year, so, it was a no brainer for me.. I will have to "downgrade" to 10/1.5 internet from my current Comcrap 15/2, but, you never see those speeds with Comcrap, except at 4 am on weekdays.....