Webfooted

I’ve had U-verse since February of 2010 and it is a mixed bag. I hate Charter which is the alternative in my area, but I wish that I hadn’t switched. I hate U-verse even more.

U-verse uses IPTV (Internet Protocol TV). this is not standard cable TV. you cannot hook up your digital or analogue cable ready TV directly to the service nor can you hook up a TIVO. you MUST use their set top boxes. you get the first one free with the DVD and it is $7 for each additional box. this is very important if you have a lot of TV’s scattered around the house.

Their DVR system has some really cool features. It can record up to four programs at once. you can watch these programs on ANY TV in the house with a set top box. you can program the DVR from any unit in the house. you can watch in the LR and decide you want to move to another room and pick up where you left off by pausing it and resuming it on the box in the other room. they recently upgraded the service so you can pause live TV in any room now which is pretty cool, too.

That is all fine and dandy, BUT you can only record three HD programs at a time. Often, you can NOT record an HD program and start watching it before it finishes. you just get a black screen, Also, you eat up the hard rive space very quickly when you record in HD. unlike TIVO, there is NO slow motion on the remote for the DVR. my old VCR had slow motion, but not U-verse. The remotes also have to be aimed right at the box. If your chair is off to the side a bit, you will have to stretch your arm to get the remote in front of the box.

There are four of us in our home. you cannot have more than four boxes on at one time, so if you forget to turn off a fourth box and go to another room to turn on a fifth box it will tell you that all of your services are busy and you cannot watch until you turn off or “interrupt” another unit. you have a maximum of four channels that can come into the house at one time. so, you also not record four channels and watch live TV at the same time. Conversely, you cannot have four boxes watching live TV and record anything.

I have had a lot of trouble with everything working. It was a daily pain when I first got the system, but it is still too often a problem. It is more of a problem with the remote units. The remote units often tell me that they cannot find the DVR and usually I cannot watch live programming either when that happens. The fix to that is to unplug the offending unit, plug it back in, and wait for the unit to reboot. Note that these boxes are really computers, so it takes a while to reboot. I probably do that at least three or four times a week for the box in my home office. I don’t know how often the kids have to in their rooms. Sometimes, I do it once and that fixes the problem, sometimes I do it several consecutive times before it works correctly.

Another problem is that you have to deal with AT&T. I really, really miss BellSouth. I really, really, REALLY HATE AT&T. I had DSL before I went with U-Verse. It took me MONTHS to get them to quit billing me for DSL after the switch. they said that they would consolidate the billing with my old land line and they did not do it. When I discontinued my land line to go with T-Mobile at home ($10 a month to add that to your T-Mobile plan) and it took MONTHS to get them to quit billing me for the land line. When I decided to add the HD service, they said it would take 24 hours to turn it on. they didn’t do it and said it would be another 48 hours, I told them to cancel my order. The operator complained that she might get a negative review and never canceled the order and the HD service turned on about a week later.

The internet part works OK, but since this is an IPTV system the signal goes through a DSL type of line into a router that funnels BOTH the TV signals to the set top boxes and the internet for your computer. If you have to reboot the router for any reason, BOTH your internet AND TV goes out (AND U-verse telephone if you have it).

I haven’t used the U-verse telephone as it was not available when it was installed. I do use the internet telephone with T-Mobile as I noted above and that works well so i have no reason to dis that part of the U-verse system. The downsides are that you have to use cordless phones for any extension as you cannot use the old phone wiring in the house and if the power goes out, you loose the phone unless you have everything on battery back up.

What I hear through the grapevine is that it either works well or it stinks. The quality of service appears to be consistent in an area. If your neighbors have it and they have a good experience, you may be OK. my neighbors that have had it say it stinks and mine does, too.

If you like what you have, I’d leave it alone. Life is too short to go through what I have gone through with U-verse. If you think that you want to make a change, let your neighbors try it out first. It does work better now than it did when the service was new to our area.

I hope this helps.

AT&T U-verse cable, internet service coming to Prichard

Tags: cable tv, charter, dandy, iptv, live tv, u verse