ATT U-verse - your opinions?

In My Humble Opinion
1

So I was convinced to switch to the new ATT U-verse package (TV, home phone, internet), enticed by their many incentives and promos right now. Does anyone have this service and like it or hate it?

Right now I have Dish and I really like their DVR service, I am wondering how ATT will compare. I do not like the hardware difficulties we have been having with Dish and I will be glad to get rid of that issue.

Also, anyone have the U-verse home phone? Any issues with that? I admit to not completely understanding the technology but I believe it is internet phone, but they say 911 will still work and all that. We have to be careful of power outages but they give up battery back up so that is nice.

We are due for install in October - it seems to be popular b/c that was the soonest appointment I could get. They said to plan on 4-6 hours! That seems like a long time, so I am interested in anyone who went through the install process and what it was like as well.

I guess any thoughts are appreciated! I am not super knowledgable about how this works but I switched mainly for price and convenience of having one bill (we also have ATT cell phones). I asked the most questions about DVR capabilities because DVR is my precious. I know U-verse is still pretty new, it just became available here and I am not usually the person who is the first to try out the brand new technology, I prefer to wait until the bugs are worked out.

2

I did find out something interesting from one of my friends who signed up for U-Verse. AT&T says that their U-Verse DVR can record 4 shows at the same time, which is true. However, if you have four TVs hooked up with the U-Verse receivers in your home, and you are recording 4 shows on your DVR, none of the other TVs will work. The TVs without the DVR will display a message saying that you must stop recording something on the DVR in order to watch TV in the other location.

My friend was excited to switch over from his cable company, because his cable DVR could only record two shows at once. However, while he was recording those two shows he could still watch tv in another room. With U-Verse, his family loses the ability to watch TV in some locations if he is recording something on his DVR. So, since his kids have TVs in their rooms, at least one of them will lose the ability to watch TV if he is recording more than one program on his DVR.

This may not be a big deal for you, but if you have more than one TV hooked up in your home, you should at least keep it in mind.

3

Hmmm. You can’t watch anything at all, not even another recorded program? Right now I have Dish, and it only records 2 shows at a time. I have 3 tvs total, 2 on the DVR and one not. Right now, if I am recording 2 shows, I can only watch what is being recorded, or something else already on the DVR. Since I mostly only watch shows off the DVR, and I rarely have to record even 2 things at once, that is ok with me. But if I will not be able to use the tv at all, for anything, while it is recording that would be kind of a pain. As long as I can watch off the DVR while it records that is fine with me.

They say with ATT you can record up to 4 shows at once, but do you need 4 tvs hooked up to do that? Or can you only record as many shows as you have tvs? I didn’t ask that.

4

I’ve had UVerse for about two weeks, and I had Dish before that. There are pros and cons to UVerse. The DVR can record four shows at once. If you are recording four shows, the only thing you can watch besides those four shows are recorded shows on the DVR. AT&T is currently rolling out “Whole Home DVR” which will allow you to watch DVR recorded shows on any TV in the house. They’ve introduced it in a couple markets and are assessing the number of tech support calls they get before deciding how quickly they should release it elsewhere. So the biggest thing you’ll notice, up front, is that you can only watch DVR recorded programs on the TV with the actual DVR (unless you live is SanFran or one of the other places with WHDVR.) My wife and I thought this would be a pretty big deal as my kids watch a lot of DVR stuff, but it has not been an issue at all because of the excellent selection of On Demand kid shows that can be watched on any TV. Pretty much any show you can think of on Nickelodeon or Noggin or PBS is there, several episodes of each which appear to rotate occasionally.

The DVR is not as good in a number of areas. The program guide is severely lacking in features that seem like total no-brainers. You can’t filter by movies, or sports, or kids shows or anything. You can see a TV guide, or you can search for a specific show. That’s it, and it really sucks. Also, you can’t tell it to record 2 or 5 or 10 episodes of a certain show and then start deleting the old ones like you could with Dish (this was a great feature if you always needed 3 or 4 episodes of Spongebob on hand.) The conflict resolution does not seem to be as good, although I have little experience with this, and with the ability to record four shows at once hopefully it won’t come up that often. One great thing about the Dish is that if it had to skip recording a show because of a conflict, it would automatically try to find that same show at a different time and get it then. I’m not sure if UVerse does this but I don’t think so. In short, the program guide/scheduling feature seems like a featureless freeware version of a program that I had previously owned the Professional version of.

Almost making up for this, though, is the ability to manage your DVR schedule and recordings from the internet. This feature actually works better than I thought it would, and while there are a few things I would like to see added, it is pretty cool. The ability to fiddle with the DVR during down time at work makes up for the extra time its inferiority causes you to waste. Another good thing is that they are constantly upgrading the service, which can be done very easily with software downloads, and there is a forum which is supposedly read by AT&T staff where you can make suggestions.

Overall I am glad I switched. I have been pretty happy with it for the last two weeks. I have “run out of streams” a couple times and been unable to watch anything, but that’s only because we are getting all the movie channels for free for the first month and my wife went crazy on recording them (something that would have been a hell of a lot easier if the program guide let you search for movies). I don’t see that being a problem in the future.

5

Thanks, that is very helpful!
The only thing I think I will miss is the “record a set number of episodes and then start deleting” feature. Like you, I used it a lot to just have a sampling of kids shows on hand, and it kept the DVR from getting full really fast and having to manually delete. But I can get over that, maybe they will add that feature in the future.

We are supposed to have the whole house DVR feature by the end of October. That will be nice.

How does the program guide do at taping shows that are pushed back (due to sports or running over the scheduled time?) Dish seemed good with that, I set up to tape shows for a certain amount over if I was unsure. Does ATT let you do that? I often hear Tivo people lament that they had a show cut off at the end, is that a problem for you?

6

Is it true that they will run cat 5 wiring inside your house if your phone wiring isn’t up to spec? Because my phone lines are in such bad condition that I can barely hear my landline.

Also, is there any way to predict when they will build out to a particular address? They offer UVerse in my city, but not in my neighborhood and AT&T is silent on when it might be available.

7

This hasn’t been as big an issue as I thought it would be, because of the On-Demand.

Yes, you can set it to go long at the end, but not to start early. That should be an easy fix, and I suspect it will happen sooner or later.

8

This is one of the recurring questions on the corporate “blog”. The information on new service areas remains a closely-guarded secret. Even to employees who are supposed to be promoting it to their friends and neighbors. :smack:

9

It’s not dependent on how many TVs you own; we have 1 TV and can still record 4 shows at once. (Only 1 of them can be a HD channel, though.)

10

Does the DVR have any outputs besides HDMI?

11

My husband says it also has “standard RCA and component in addition to HDMI”; we’re playing it through RCA apparently.

12

Thanks. I’ve been considering U-verse, but I’m not ready to buy a new TV yet.

13

So I googled, found http://www.uverse.att.com/, and got:

Color me unimpressed…

14

Well to be fair it was 4:47am. It is better to do maintenance at that hour than in the middle of the day.

I have heard of this but it is not available in my area yet. As soon as it is I will be looking in to it.

15

As SomeUserName said, you have to do maintenance some time. Follow that link now, and it’s up and running.

16

Funny, I can record two HD channels at a time. Must depend on the bandwidth available in your area.

It’s got regular coax too, but using it for some reason causes a drop in sound volume (10 db, according to the installer). I’m using it on an old TV and it’s not that big a deal. Still has a great picture too.

Oh, and I forgot to address one point in the OP, yes the installation took every bit of 6 hours. Of course, the guy who did mine was a talker; he probably could have done it in four and a half or five, but he was a very nice guy and I didn’t mind at all. I pestered him with tons of questions about how it worked and how he was setting it up too, and then he gave my wife and I a tutorial at the end.

17

My folks were looking into this, since it recently became available in their neighborhood. They’re skeptical, because they’ve been burned by “fiber to the home” before. A couple things:

First, my understanding is that there’s only one HD stream available, period. As in, if you’re recording an HD program, none of the other TVs in the house will be able to view high def channel. If you have more than one HD TV in the house, that might be a problem.

Also, I’ve heard from people who’ve tested it that AT&T’s programming, because it’s delivered over IP, is more highly compressed than satellite programming, and on larger televisions you can have some “blockiness” issues occasionally.

As for me: I have Dish Network, and I can record three shows at once. How, you ask? With an antenna, I answer smugly. I put one of those big ol’ aluminum TV antennas in my attic and ran a cable down, hooked it up to the antenna input on the Dish receiver, had it look for digital channels, and now I get the local channels in high definition that looks better than the high-def I get from the dish. Hooking up the antenna gives you an extra tuner to record from, so I can record three programs at once, so long as one of them is off the antenna (which is usually the case; most of the stuff we watch is on the networks).

For anyone who has a modern HD TV, I’d recommend adding an antenna to your lineup. Dish Network boxes have excellent support for antennas built right in to their receivers already, which is nice. Plus, you can split the antenna’s cable, run the second line into your digital-tuner-equipped TV (or your digital TV converter box), and watch your local channels that way when your DVR is occupied recording multiple things at once. Heck, split it three ways, and use it for excellent radio reception, too; go nuts.

18

I have 2 HD streams. I can record two HD shows simultaneously, or 1 HD and 2 SD. (This is according to the installer, I don’t have any HD TVs in my house so I can’t verify.) Looking at the forums it looks like 2HD streams is slowly being rolled out in various markets, so likely this will change for you soon.

I’ve seen some complaints about this on their forums, usually the person is trying to record 2 HD shows, and talking on both telephone lines, and downloading a whole bunch of torrents at the same time when they have trouble.

ETA: a couple of relevant posts from a Uverse forum:

"You can check your DVR for the 2HD streams.

Go to MENU>Options>System Settings>System Information>System resources"

and

“Just last week I called up sales asking about the 2HD/2SD profile and she immediately sent the update to my [set top boxes], no more recording conflicts! Also noticed a few new HD channels; USA, Bravo, SciFi and some new HBOs.”

19

Good stuff, thanks. We don’t have HD so concerns with that don’t bother me.

I will update with my impression after we get it. (Oct. 3)

20

I switched last week from Comcast. We had a hurricane here, but we didn’t lose internet or cable service (or power for very long.) I heard that lots of Comcast customers are still without cable and internet. (That’s just a rumor though.)

I haven’t been recording much DVR stuff yet. The only feature that bugs me is adding a new channel to Favorites. You have to scroll down and down and down instead of typing in a channel number. You can’t add a channel you’re watching to the favorites list. PITA.