I had one of those 30-minute sales calls from AT&T U-Verse today. Like many sales calls, it sounds great, so I wonder - "ok, what's the catch
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So, one 'catch' that may or may not be true for where you live, and may or may not matter depending on what sorts of speeds you anticipate needing in the future, is they may have misled you about how far the fiber comes. I was told I would get fiber to the home, but instead got fiber to the node (some pole in my neighborhood). There is a DSL connection from the pole to my home, and in practice, we are able to get 36 Mb/s to the house (I was shown this in a test during the install - may actually be more now they fixed a problem in the line), which is more than I plan to use in the foreseeable future, so I don't care other than the misleading.
The internet has been good. Speeds pretty close to what I'm paying for (about as close as I had with TWC), and lower latency than I had with TWC (yay gaming). Both after the original install, and after we moved the main router and changed its connection, we had random slowness for 1 or 2 days, but it cleared up both times and I haven't noticed it since. The router has built-in wireless, 802.11g, and pretty easy to configure as routers go. I was sad about going from my own 802.11n router to this, but if I want I can hook that up with a direct connection to the U-Verse one (it has 4 ethernet ports).
The TV has also been good, although in theory we won't be keeping it (a decision we made when we moved before we'd even picked U-Verse). Changing channels is zippier than with TWC, and having the picture-in-picture while browsing the guide is pretty cool. Random neatnesses: - As I'm sure they've told you, you can record up to 4 things at once. - Also heavily advertised, you can record on the dvr and watch the recording from any other tv box, though we only have one box and thus haven't tried it. - Scheduled recordings record extra time before and after the show by default, so if a show starts earlier or ends later in unplanned fashion, you're likely to be ok. - You can of course pad by specific amounts if you anticipate shows that will run even longer than that. - Corollary to that: if you record back-to-back shows and the former is padded, the latter will still start recording at its usual time, and you'll just have overlap on what's recorded (i.e. it won't push back the later recording so that if the earlier show *didn't* run late, you won't have to straddle two recordings to see the beginning of the later show).
Random annoyances: - Our tv box doesn't remember the aspect ratio if it loses power. By default it's set to 640x480 I think, so if we lose power I have to change it back to 1080i (which, since it does the whole "test for 15 seconds, did it look ok?" thing, is more annoying than it need be). - The tv box doesn't automatically filter out channels that you don't pay for. So all 450 or however many channels they offer will be in the guide, unless you do configuration to get them out of the way. That said, as far as I can tell, the channels seem to be grouped somewhat by tier, so it's been easy for us to browse through channels without every other one being blank. - The DVR doesn't automatically record shows via wishlist or 'same show on other channel' or any other suggestion mechanism like Tivo does. - You can't watch TV from U-Verse without a box (unlike how cable was (dunno if the digital switch changed anything but I doubt it) where you could hook up the tv directly to the line and get basic cable).
More to come in a separate comment, since I made the comment too long.
The internet has been good. Speeds pretty close to what I'm paying for (about as close as I had with TWC), and lower latency than I had with TWC (yay gaming). Both after the original install, and after we moved the main router and changed its connection, we had random slowness for 1 or 2 days, but it cleared up both times and I haven't noticed it since. The router has built-in wireless, 802.11g, and pretty easy to configure as routers go. I was sad about going from my own 802.11n router to this, but if I want I can hook that up with a direct connection to the U-Verse one (it has 4 ethernet ports).
The TV has also been good, although in theory we won't be keeping it (a decision we made when we moved before we'd even picked U-Verse). Changing channels is zippier than with TWC, and having the picture-in-picture while browsing the guide is pretty cool.
Random neatnesses:
- As I'm sure they've told you, you can record up to 4 things at once.
- Also heavily advertised, you can record on the dvr and watch the recording from any other tv box, though we only have one box and thus haven't tried it.
- Scheduled recordings record extra time before and after the show by default, so if a show starts earlier or ends later in unplanned fashion, you're likely to be ok.
- You can of course pad by specific amounts if you anticipate shows that will run even longer than that.
- Corollary to that: if you record back-to-back shows and the former is padded, the latter will still start recording at its usual time, and you'll just have overlap on what's recorded (i.e. it won't push back the later recording so that if the earlier show *didn't* run late, you won't have to straddle two recordings
to see the beginning of the later show).
Random annoyances:
- Our tv box doesn't remember the aspect ratio if it loses power. By default it's set to 640x480 I think, so if we lose power I have to change it back to 1080i (which, since it does the whole "test for 15 seconds, did it look ok?" thing, is more annoying than it need be).
- The tv box doesn't automatically filter out channels that you don't pay for. So all 450 or however many channels they offer will be in the guide, unless you do configuration to get them out of the way. That said, as far as I can tell, the channels seem to be grouped somewhat by tier, so it's been easy for us to browse through channels without every other one being blank.
- The DVR doesn't automatically record shows via wishlist or 'same show on other channel' or any other suggestion mechanism like Tivo does.
- You can't watch TV from U-Verse without a box (unlike how cable was (dunno if the digital switch changed anything but I doubt it) where you could hook up the tv directly to the line and get basic cable).
More to come in a separate comment, since I made the comment too long.
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