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My Personal AT&T U-Verse Review
/ 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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10 Comments
SO, it’s been a few months, what do you think now? They just came to town and have the whole house dvr.
I’ve actually moved from where I had U-Verse to a different town and went with Comcast (the easy way to start). It’s an apartment complex but the U-Verse site does say it’s available for this address and I’m really about ready to ditch Comcast and go U-Verse again over here (as long as the management co. lets them run the wire) .. I’ll post again if I can do it and how it’s going.. My parents have it and the new Whole Home DVR is great!
I am having issue with trying to get DVR content recorded onto DVD. I had no issue with DirecTV and now I have a whole DVR of college bowl games that I can’t get onto DVD. U-Verse said “Too bad” when I called after consulting Panasonic and being told that U-Verse had put a signal into their system to tell the DVD recorder that the content was copyrighted and unrecordable. This was almost a month after installation and I had already done several recordings with no problems. Any one have any suggestions??
U Verse sucks…The installation process is terrible. They are completely un-professional. I cleared 1/2 a day for installation, the tech was out for 10 min and said the phone company needed to do something and he would be right back. He never showed back up!! I had to call later that afternoon to find out they would need to send someone out the next day from the phone company. He finally shows up and tells me all good, call the uverse phone # and schedule another install appt. Well after being put on hold for 1hr, i am told that the work order was never completed and I can not set up a date for another 2 weeks!! F-Uverse. I will stick to comcast. THEIR INSTALL TEAM SUCKS!!
Larry: That sucks, man. I know U-Verse isn’t perfect. Like I said, it took a good month before they actually got the service working 100%. Lots of phone calls and lots of discounts later resulted in a decent service though. Every day I spend with the comcast DVR at my new place just brings me closer and closer to calling U-Verse again.. It will definitely happen soon..
I’m having U-Verse installed June 13th. I’ll report back for a review.
Uverse sucks, I agree with you Larry. Uverse is terrible as terrible can be. The installation team , their customer service has no respect or value their customers. Time warner is not that great but atleast they will do what they promise you to do. My uverse installation took good four days to be installed. They told me we are going to be their between the hours of 9Am -2pm. The tech never showed up. I wasted the whole day. I called back at 2:30pm that no one had showed up they gave me another excuse that the tech is late in another work in the area he will be there at 8pm. At 8pm the tech still did not showed yet. I called back to complaint they told the tech he had to go home he will be there first thing in the morning. As if,.I had all the time to seat around for them. The next day somebody came in at 11AM and said that order was not completed so he got to go to another assignment. Unbelievable AT& T. I called their customer service back. They apologized for inconvenience and promised to give $250 credit which later they said it was a mistake they can not give that much. So they wound giving me $100 credit card which was like puling the tooth out. I had to call them and not let them get away with that promise this time. Another time not too long the signal died for three days. I have my class done on line and my final was due within this three days. I thought the problem will be fixed in minutes but I was deadly wrong. I missed my final and my instructor would not accept this excuse until he get a later from uverse cable internet stated of down system. The Uverse had someone in Philipine picked up their customer service phone and agreed to write a letter to my professor. The tech. support took my name, college name, address and phone number. Guess what? They never wrote a letter or phoned my professor in result i did not get any score. This is 9 credit hours course which costed $389 per credit hour.I called back asked to speak with manager to see if they will write something but the manager replied that AT &T does not write any letter to customers. I asked why did they promised me so? She reply the philipine customer service they were wrong and do not understand their policy. How would I know that the philipine customer service is qualified or trustworthy with the information they are giving out to customer is truth and what is lies? I told her that AT &T should be responsible with his employees. If they think Philipines are not well trained the should put well trained employee of their choice. I don’t care where they come from as far they are well trained and speak fluent English. I order upgrade to uverse 450 channels is still stack somewhere for two days now. Tomorrow will be third day because now is 1:00AM PST and their tech support philipino again said that they can not fix the problem because they limited for what they can fix. I thought if the order stack for two to three days tech support should be able to fix it. I have no idea how long it will take to be fix. I assure you that I will keep you updated. I just miss Time Warner they just make me think I made a terrible mistake to leave time warner . I wish would read the review first before deciding to sign up with them. I just going to wait my next day off to do some changes. Time Warner they are not that great but they are better and keep their words not like Uverse that is for sure and it means alot to me.
So far I don’t have any problem with my Uverse. With all the bad publicity, I’m lucky no to encounter. I don’t know maybe location perhaps.
Two hour install. Other techs came to help the first guy. Been with u-verse for about 5 weeks. No problems. easy menus and DVR operation. No outages to speak of unlike Charter cable. Anyone watching the Packer/Ram game on Charter was treated to 20 min. outage. Not me. Internet speed is good. set top box WITH a DVR is half the size of charters. Can’t speak about customer service quality because it has not been needed. Very happy with AT&T.
Wow! I had Comcast and it stinks, went with Direct TV 2 year contract which I hate, Direct TV all in all I liked except losing the signal in a storm or a 20 minute reboot after a power glitch. Finally went with the new kid on the block, U-Verse. The install is a little lengthy but that is the way it goes. I had no problems and was up and running right away. I had DSL internet for years and I do plenty of on line gaming and never had any type of problems. The phone service is excellent and I have options now I never had before and a whole lot cheaper. Oh! and I tried Vontage and they are a bunch of crooks! All in all, my pick is U-Verse if you can get it installed correctly from what I am reading. I feel the picture quality is great. The menu is a little more complicated then I was used to with Direct TV but there are many more features with U-Verse. I also love the fact I do not have any hardware mounted to my house and NO contract. Another nice feature is you can control everything from a computer remotely. I think U-Verse is number 1 in my opinion and should keep getting better with time.
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