Its a Big U(ni)verse, and You're Not

You know, if it weren't for marketing and advertising, today's youngsters would have no useful outlet for their inability to spell. Which brings us to Uverse, AT&T's fire across the bow to the cable companies and Verizon. And even though its not quite FTTP, its the next best thing for people living in older neighborhoods who want an alternative to Comcast or TimeWarner (or, in our case, both). Goodbye cable, hello IPTV!

AT&T installs a converter to go the last leg from the neighborhood wiring station to the home, which makes it similar to DSL in terms of using copper pairs for the high speed signal. But instead of converting to a digital signal at a phone jack in the house, the technicians add a converter in the phone access panel at the residence and generate a cable compatible signal that uses the existing cable in your home. Once in the home, a router takes the signal and diverts it to the three (in my case) STBs . (I'm still not sure why they need this extraneous routing leg, but its there.)

You may ask yourself "Gee, isn't this digital stuff already available from my cable company?" (edit --lame Talking Heads joke deleted) . Well, yes and no. We had digital cable for a year, and its anything but ideal. Sure, the upper channels and subscriber stuff is digital, but a great deal of their content is still analog, and their signal quality is iffy as well. Some of the local channels were unwatchable, and there was visible ghosting sometimes. Then there is the issue of outages, which averaged about once a month in our neighborhood (max time was two days, the average length was about half a day). So when the local phone guys came to test the lines for signal integrity, I was more than interested in hopping on the fiber bandwagon.

So, here's the upside:
1)We get three boxes, one of which is a DVR, all of which are HD capable (11 HD channels are available, 26 if you count things like HBO HD, etc ). That's 300 plus channels for $74 bucks (plus misc charges, of course). Cheaper than Comcast, and theres even a package in the $50 range.

2)We get a wireless router that goes with our high speed internet, which is available at different speed grades. We have the basic express, but you can get upwards of 5mbps BOTH WAYS (Comcast only provided 256k upstream).

3) For the first year, the HD content is free. After that, its a $10 surcharge.

4) While not expected until the fourth quarter, the boxes have an upgrade in the works that allows the two STBs to stream off of the DVR. (Yes!)

5) 360+ channels available, with more to come. Since this is IPTV, they can add channels to your hearts content, since you don't have to steam them all simultaneously in the neighborhood.

6) You can program the DVR remotely via your Uverse webpage. I already have this feature with my Snapstream BeyondTV, so I'm glad I don't have to give it up.

7) Some of the channels are West coast feeds, so you might have missed the start of something on the East coast but not the West (too bad this isn't true for the major networks. If you miss the first 2 minutes of "According to Jim", the show just doesn't seem funny. Oddly enough, I apparently have missed the first two minutes of every episode of "Jim" I've every seen. I'm sure there's no connection.)



Here's the downside:
1) You use up your existing cable wiring, so forget about routing an antenna to use alongside Uverse. (You can avoid this if you have cat5 wiring throughout your house. Which would mean you probably have a boy named Elroy and his lovable mutt Astro).

2)Its inconsistent. The HD channels look great, and a lot of the other channels as well. But some of the lineup is over compressed. My first evening with the system found me surfing to Adult Swim to catch Futurama. I almost threw the remote through the TV. (Futurama and the Simpsons don't get much lovin' from mpeg. Big areas of solid color with lots of motion but no naturally occurring blur to disguise your compression artifacts. Ack!)

3)Bandwidth limitations can get tricky. Sure, you can record four shows at once, but not in HD. In fact, we've only been able to get one HD stream at a time, so no watching one show HD and recording the other. This is a household limitation, so if you want to watch the big game HD you better not have a kid in the next room watching the Wiggles in HD or you'll be locked out.

4) "I know TIVO. TIVO is a friend of mine. Uverse is no TIVO." The DVR functions are rudimentary at best. You can pause live TV and record shows, but that is it. No way to get those programs off your DVR, unless you want to hookup a VCR. (How 80s can you get?) And you'll get a hoot initially from all the errors in the programming guide (ABC News is listed as "Music" and Nancy Grace is "Action/Adventure"!) but the fifth or sixth time that your recording didn't happen because of a guide glitch, everyone stops laughing. ("program did not occur within the scheduled time". So what, is that any reason to not record ANYTHING?

5) Don't unplug the boxes! Lose the connection to the IPTV server, and you may have to spend a good hour getting all three boxes plus router up and running. Each box takes between 5 and ten MINUTES to boot initially, and they have to be cycled sequentially, not concurrently. (Me thinks a Microsoft OS is afoot, my good Dr. Watson)

6) Customer service. Holy cow, that's a whole post by itself!

7) Not all of the local channels HD content is available. It would be nice to have the ancillary channels for things like weather radar (hurricane season, you know). And the Weather Channel is missing the local radar and forecast data as well. Bummer.

Enough for tonight. I'll post a bit more on the tech, and a lot more on the end user experience. As of this writing, there are four other wireless networks that have the telltale signature of Uverse that my computer can see. That's not good news for Comcast.

Good night all. Lets hope I'm spared my recurring dream of standing in line for the Simpsons Movie and walking by mistake into the Underdog live action flick. Night sweats indeed!

*(for those who missed the title reference)

Kelvin