# AT&T Uverse v. DTV



## 1953 (Feb 7, 2006)

We are constantly receiving Uverse TV offers. Is AT&T Uverse to pare or better than DTV?


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

I took a test drive of U-verse "figuring" the PQ would suck.
It turned out not to, but their DVR sure did.


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## 1953 (Feb 7, 2006)

Did you stay with AT&T?


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## JoeTheDragon (Jul 21, 2008)

Does Uverse still not have NHLNetwork?


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## coolman302003 (Jun 2, 2008)

It's worth mentioning there are a few major channels that they do not carry at all:

NHL Network
Hallmark 
Hallmark Movie Channel

There are also various limitations with the product; I will list a few notables:

No OTA tuner or add on module available (e.g. AM-21) on their receivers/DVRs
U-Verse carries even less OTA sub channels then D*

[*]4 TV streams total (depending on your profile that could be 2SD/2HD, 3HD/1SD or 4HD/0SD)
[*]They add channels (at random) to your guide even when you have previously hid them

Some notable sports subscription packages they do not offer:

NFL ST
MLB EI
MLS DK
NHL CI


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

1953 said:


> Did you stay with AT&T?


I dropped the TV service before my 30 day trial was over.
They had a piece of bad hardware on their end of the fiber, which caused my equipment to drop off the network.
It wasn't bad for internet [to wait], but was a pain with the TV.
I spent too many hours on the phone with their CSRs and had many techs out, and finally threw in the towel as it just wasn't worth my time.
About three months later they fixed the problem on their end.
Between the service run around and the crappy DVR, "U-verse" is a "cluster f***" and not the old AT&T I've been used to.


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## Paul Secic (Dec 16, 2003)

1953 said:


> We are constantly receiving Uverse TV offers. Is AT&T Uverse to pare or better than DTV?


No Uverse in some are awful. You need to very close to a VAR. I had it until it went out for 14 hours one Saturday.


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## texas16309 (Jun 11, 2007)

Give Uverse a shot. They offer a 30-day free trial.

I signed up with them in Oct of last year. The service has been rock solid.The DVR I received is very small - the Pace IPH 8005. It measures 9.8"x6.1"x1.6". It's much faster than the Genie I had. My wireless clients in the bedrooms are also significantly faster than the mini genie clients. I can't stress that enough. For picture quality I'd give Uverse a 4 out of 5 while DirecTV a 4.5 out of 5. 

What I don't miss about DirecTV is rain fade. I got rain fade in Texas almost every time it rained even though my signal was in the 90s. Also, ATT doesn't charge a whole DVR home fee. At my level of programing they don't charge a DVR fee and they waive the HD fee (U450). I also like how fast the channel changes are. I'm limited to 3hd/1sd but I haven't ran into a problem with it. My friends down the street have 4hd/0sd for their streams. So it's distance limited. However, people on Gigapower here in Austin have 5hd streams with six on the way from what I've read.

What I miss about DirecTV is the music channels. I hate MusicChoice mainly because they have ads showing as they play music. I also hate the organization of the channels in the Uverse guide. SD is at one end of the guide, HD is at the other end. But I hope some of this will change since Ericsson bought Mediaroom from Microsoft. It seems Microsoft let the product go stale. There's no Youtube app, Pandora, or the like.

I'm not into sports so there's nothing I'm missing there. They have all the HD channels I watch. But really, only you can decide. I really like it.


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## 1953 (Feb 7, 2006)

Discovered AT&T does not have fiber optic here so. The signal would be through coxial. Would that be a great detriment?


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## texas16309 (Jun 11, 2007)

The way it usually works is fiber to the neighborhood VRAD node. From the VRAD the signal goes over telephone cable to your house. From the house over a home run cable to the Uverse gateway. My home run is cat 5 and my gateway is a Motorola NVG589. From my gateway my DVR is on coax. The other two receivers are wireless. The tech would have used cat 5 to my DVR but I didn't have one close. Coax is working fine for within the house. I may run a cat 5 or 6 to the DVR but I'm not in any rush. The wireless boxes are just as fast as the wired and the picture looks just as good.

My install took about four hours. But I think that was because I didn't have any ATT services at all so he had to do work at the VRAD box and outside my house. I'm on a bonded pair but my friends in the neighborhood are on a single pair. That means my install uses two phone lines. Again, my service has been solid and I couldn't be happier (minus the few annoyances). My installer even left all my DTV cables intact minus the one he needed for the DVR run.


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## carlsbad_bolt_fan (May 18, 2004)

In my area, Carlsbad CA, it's affectionately known as "ScrUverse" because they screw you out of picture quality and internet speeds. Both are awful here and we were one of the first in the country (or so we were told) to be offered this service.

Then figure in the "it's not IF but WHEN AT&T screws up" factor and it just screams stay away.


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## PCampbell (Nov 18, 2006)

I have uverse for internet and voice and it works wery well. as for outages I have no problem but know people around here that have outages on the TV part. I had the tv for 90 days as a test, the limit of 3 channels in HD at once is a killer for us in the winter. I can record 6HD at a time with DirecTV and watch a 7th. Also with Uverse the internet slows down when watching HD channels. I guy at work can only get 2 HD at once so when recording one and watching one his second TV can not be used. Over all it is a good service If you dont watch a lot of TV at once or a small famly.


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

1953 said:


> Discovered AT&T does not have fiber optic here so. The signal would be through coxial. Would that be a great detriment?


As mentioned there is fiber to the VRAD and twisted pair from there.
The Apartment utility room was where it came in and first round was twisted pair to the apartment, but in their attempts to fix their problem, they changed over to using the coax to the apartment.
I was so close to the VRAD that the modem received 64 Mb/s, but "my profile" was 32 Mb/s.
I could record 3 HD and watch another HD but didn't have DVR functions, so no pausing.
Internet was 12 Mb/s and I didn't see any impact from the TV service.

"Service" turned out to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
I had excess of 30 hours on the phone trying to get the dropped connection resolved.
Had the source been anywhere from the VRAD to my apartment, it would have been resolved, but with it being on "their end" of the fiber, whoever dealt with that side were in a "black hole" that no one could get to look at their problem.
Three months working with the area manager before "the switch" was replaced.

My "first clue" about U-Verse being different from AT&T:
Moving in I had internet and POTS service, but no dial tone.
Several calls explaining I had no dial tone and all they said was "the line tested good".
Two days later "the phone tech" found they'd NEVER connected my line at their B box in the street.
Internet yes, but phone NO.


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## 1953 (Feb 7, 2006)

We have AT&T Uverse Voice and very high speed Uverse Internet. The bottom fell out of the fiber optic market before any was installed in our area of Dallas County. Of course, we have DTV. Been with DTV for about 13 years. I am simply looking for a less expensive alternative. DTV is as near flawless as I think is possible. AT&T is on the radar ONLY because I MAY could reduce all of our media costs. Time will tell. Will not make an uneducated decision.


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## PCampbell (Nov 18, 2006)

I called Directv last summer and told them what the latest uverse TV offer I was sent and directv beat it and added in Sunday Ticket. It is best to call and ask you have nothing to lose.


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## NashGuy (Jan 30, 2014)

I just switched a couple of weeks ago from AT&T U-verse to DirecTV. Had U-verse for about a year. I had Dish for about four years prior to U-verse. I had heard a lot about U-verse and finally decided to switch to them in early 2013 after I realized all of the rebates I could get. If you sign up online using certain links, you can get a bigger rebates from AT&T than if you just go straight to their site. (Most expensive is if you call or visit a store to sign up.) On top of the main rebate for committing to a year of TV plus internet service, I stacked an AT&T refer-a-friend rebate, a Coupon Cactus rebate, an AT&T paperless billing rebate, plus rebates from Showtime and Starz. It was a lot of hoops to jump through but they added up to around $400 I think, on top of a $50 discount each month off my combined TV and internet bill. I had HD DVR service with a ton of channels, including Showtime and Starz for a year, plus HBO and Cinemax for six months. When you divided out all the rebates evenly across 12 months of service, my effective monthly TV bill averaged about $37 for all that (plus another $56 for internet). It was a *great* deal.

That said, I was never as pleased with the picture quality of U-verse as I was with Dish. With U-verse, images tended to be softer, pixelation and macroblocking during action scenes were worse, and there would be occasional pixelations in part of the screen for no apparent reason at all. It wasn't really bad, I certainly got used to it, but there's no question that the picture quality was inferior. Still, given the deal I got, it was worth trying for a year.

I did have problems with the first DVR they gave me, which was their top-of-the-line one at the time. The screen would go black or freeze randomly. A tech came out, rechecked everything in my installation after a week or so of service but could find nothing wrong. He told me if the problems persisted, I'd have to swap out my DVR. They did, so I did. Had no problems with the second DVR, although it was the next model down; the user interface was the same as the first DVR but the second one had less capacity. After that, U-verse was very reliable for me. Unless the power went out, my TV and internet never went out. I found AT&T's customer service to be great. Was also impressed with their website and its account management features.

Seeing as how my bill was about to really go up, I switched to DirecTV with a two-year commitment for TV and back to Comcast for internet. So far, I love DirecTV. The HD picture quality is great. I think it may even be slightly better than Dish. It's way better than U-verse. And I really like the Genie DVR. Slick interface with multiple tuners plus I like the recommendations feature. The selection of HD On Demand content for premium channels (Showtime, etc.) is definitely better than what U-verse offered, although U-verse did offer HD On Demand content for the major broadcast networks, whereas DirecTV only has SD stuff from them. The Genie is better than the DVR I had with U-verse or the old VIP-720 I had with Dish (neither of which were bad). And I'm getting much faster internet for less money with Comcast too than what I had with U-verse. Plus I can use my own higher speed wireless router with Comcast internet. With U-verse, you have to use their "gateway" they rent you, which is a combined modem and router and only offers 802.11g (not the faster n) wireless.

So while I don't regret trying U-verse, given the money it saved me, I wouldn't switch back. If HD picture quality is really important to you, go with either DirecTV or Dish.


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## texas16309 (Jun 11, 2007)

I guess ATT has been changing out to newer equipment over the past year. I have a Pace dvr which came out mid to end of last year. The dvr software is the same though. My gateway is a Motorola NVG589. It has 802.11n and a pass through mode if you want to use your own router. Also speed is up to 45/6 if you are within a certain distance from the VRAD. I had uverse years ago and it was pretty bad. Lots of pixelation and such. But, as others have noticed, I only see it on fast scenes. I've tweaked my TV and Uverse generally looks fine for pretty much all viewing situations. But DirecTV's picture wasn't perfect either. To each his own.


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## ndfan1993 (Jan 9, 2013)

I found their online DVR management to be second to none - big step down from Uverse. The picture quality wasn't as good in my opinion but overall had a great experience with Uverse. We never had a problem with their DVR. The big downside with it is the number of tuners and the storage space on Uverse if that is something that really is a big deal to you.


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## terryfoster (Nov 15, 2006)

veryoldschool said:


> I was so close to the VRAD that the modem received 64 Mb/s, but "my profile" was 32 Mb/s.
> I could record 3 HD and watch another HD but didn't have DVR functions, so no pausing.


It's my understanding that 3HD shows recording is an equipment limitation, not a "profile" or speed limitation. From what I have read, their DVR is limited to recording 3 HD streams and 1 SD stream at once ("record 4 shows at once") even if you have a 4HD profile.


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## veryoldschool (Dec 10, 2006)

terryfoster said:


> It's my understanding that this is an equipment limitation, not a "profile" or speed limitation.


If you look into the modem/router, you'll see your "profile" [their term] is the limit.
32 Mb/s was their highest [when I had service] and talking with a supervisor I heard they were looking at 48 Mb/s.
The increase was for internet usage and not more TV service/channels.
Recording 3 HD programs does seem to be limited by the DVR as when watching a 4th on the receiver lost DVR functions. Being able to watch a 4th HD show surprised me as it was more than I'd been told I could.
The 24 Mb/s profile is limited to two HD.
"The profile" is established during the installation with what your line will support.


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## coolman302003 (Jun 2, 2008)

terryfoster said:


> From what I have read, their DVR is limited to recording 3 HD streams and 1 SD stream at once ("record 4 shows at once") even if you have a 4HD profile.


If your area has the 0 SD/ 4 HD Ingress profile then you are able to record 4 HD at once. Its been rolling out slowly in various areas so its not everywhere yet. Of course your line also has to have already been qualified for the 0 SD/4HD (WAN); 1 SD/3 HD (Ingress) previously.

http://forums.att.com/t5/Features-and-How-To/Ingress-Profile-0-SD-4-HD/td-p/3567733


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## Milenkod (Jun 5, 2007)

FWIW, I've had all of them. D*, U-Verse and Comcast/XFinity....albeit D* about 7 years ago. I dumped D* to go with Comcast, then to U-Verse as it was new to my area at that time. It uses Mpeg4 compression so I thought it would be the same as D* quality. WRONG!! Sporting events looked horrible and the whole system is very sensitive to older wiring....I had glitches/freezing that required a truck roll 6 separate times over 18 months. I have arial wiring outside so we are copper-last-mile, not fiber to the curb....about 2700ft to the VRAD. I mention this as those who have fiber to the curb had reportedly good quality and no issues/freezing; a testament to older wiring again. However, I never experienced a fiber to the curb feed so I can't say for sure that PQ was better. I got 18Mbps service so we had a good signal and rarely had internet issues.

I eventually switched back to Comcast on a promotion too good to pass up. the picture quality on Comcast is better than U-Verse but the menu system on my old MotoRazr flip phone is more modern than Comcast's UI.

That said, I'm switching back to DirecTV for price and superior picture quality and U-Vers internet/phone. Comparing all three, DirecTV has the best PQ besides OTA antenna. My parents still have D* and it looks fantastic on their 8 year old HD set. I'm curious to see what it's going to look like on my new 4K set....


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## terryfoster (Nov 15, 2006)

veryoldschool said:


> If you look into the modem/router, you'll see your "profile" [their term] is the limit.
> 32 Mb/s was their highest [when I had service] and talking with a supervisor I heard they were looking at 48 Mb/s.
> The increase was for internet usage and not more TV service/channels.
> Recording 3 HD programs does seem to be limited by the DVR as when watching a 4th on the receiver lost DVR functions. Being able to watch a 4th HD show surprised me as it was more than I'd been told I could.
> ...


Sorry, I see where my post wasn't clear and have modified. I was trying to speak directly to the DVR limitation which is something I think is VERY unclear from advertisements. Now that I can record 7 shows at once in HD, I'd have a hard time switching to something that could only record 3.


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## terryfoster (Nov 15, 2006)

coolman302003 said:


> If your area has the 0 SD/ 4 HD Ingress profile then you are able to record 4 HD at once. Its been rolling out slowly in various areas so its not everywhere yet. Of course your line also has to have already been qualified for the 0 SD/4HD (WAN); 1 SD/3 HD (Ingress) previously.
> 
> http://forums.att.com/t5/Features-and-How-To/Ingress-Profile-0-SD-4-HD/td-p/3567733


Cool, thanks for that! Apparently it's been awhile since I searched for UV having the ability to record 4 at a time.


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## NashGuy (Jan 30, 2014)

Milenkod said:


> FWIW, I've had all of them. D*, U-Verse and Comcast/XFinity....albeit D* about 7 years ago. I dumped D* to go with Comcast, then to U-Verse as it was new to my area at that time. It uses Mpeg4 compression so I thought it would be the same as D* quality. WRONG!! Sporting events looked horrible and the whole system is very sensitive to older wiring....I had glitches/freezing that required a truck roll 6 separate times over 18 months. I have arial wiring outside so we are copper-last-mile, not fiber to the curb....about 2700ft to the VRAD. I mention this as those who have fiber to the curb had reportedly good quality and no issues/freezing; a testament to older wiring again. However, I never experienced a fiber to the curb feed so I can't say for sure that PQ was better. I got 18Mbps service so we had a good signal and rarely had internet issues.
> 
> I eventually switched back to Comcast on a promotion too good to pass up. the picture quality on Comcast is better than U-Verse but the menu system on my old MotoRazr flip phone is more modern than Comcast's UI.
> 
> That said, I'm switching back to DirecTV for price and superior picture quality and U-Vers internet/phone. Comparing all three, DirecTV has the best PQ besides OTA antenna. My parents still have D* and it looks fantastic on their 8 year old HD set. I'm curious to see what it's going to look like on my new 4K set....


When I had U-verse, I was about the same distance to the VRAD, maybe 2500 ft, with the signal going over old copper wires from there to my house. I also have an OTA antenna in the attic with the feed going directly into the TV. When I would occasionally switch over from U-verse to OTA, it was shocking how much better the OTA HD picture was.

I've had Dish, U-verse and now DirecTV all on the same 52 inch Samsung 1080p TV (and Comcast on a 34 inch HDTV before that) and I definitely agree that DirecTV has the best picture quality. There are times when I'm watching DirecTV that I would mistake it for OTA. At its best, it's just a step down from Blu-ray or Vudu HDX quality. That said, the DirecTV picture isn't always that good all the time on every channel. And I do have some occasional random pixelation now and then with DirecTV (seems to show up more often on the Showtime HD channels for whatever reason), but then I also had that even worse with U-verse (although never had it with Dish except maybe during rain fade).

I think the user interface for DirecTV's Genie (HR44) is overall the best I've had of any provider, although I never had the Dish Hopper. When I was with Dish, I had the VIP-722 (which was perfectly fine). One gripe I do have about the Genie, though, is that you can only see 1.5 hours of programming on the grid at a time. That said, the Genie scrolls FAST through the grid. I've never seen anything close to it in that regard.


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## Milenkod (Jun 5, 2007)

I got my install done Sunday morning. PQ is great and really impressed with the Genie and mini-Genies. The menu and channel change speed has vastly improved since 7 years ago. Happy so far and it's been raining pretty heavy today...no issues. 


Sent from my iPad using DBSTalk


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## MeanderingThroughLife (May 31, 2014)

*This is how U-Verse works:*

The VRAD (video ready access device) is fed by fibre optic cable from the central office. The VRAD is basically a computer that converts the fiber to copper. The VRAD is then spliced into the crossbox (usually only a block or two, generally about 200 pairs because face it not everyone is going to get the service so they limit the number and add more later if necessary).

The problem occurs from the crossbox to the customers premises. Depending on your neighborhood the existing plant can be up to 50 years old. When the outside plant techs condition the neighborhoods they dedicate pairs to each living unit depending on your distance to the crossbox you are either in the PBZ (pair bonding zone) or you are close enough to only require a single pair. These jobs are drawn up by engineers and they determine according to your distance from the crossbox how many pairs you need. If you're in the PBZ you require two pairs and the terminal/pedestal that you and your neighbors are fed out of requires a pair for bonding known as a T-com. When the techs condition the existing plant they are removing bridged taps and also cutting your dedicated pair dead to the field side so that the signal doesn't continue on past your terminal. All this is to get the strongest possible signal from that crossbox to your home so that the signal doesn't go anywhere else except from the crossbox straight to your home.

After the conditioning is complete more techs go out and test the completed job. All dedicated pairs are tested. You may only have 400 pairs that are dedicated out of an 1800 pair crossbox. They must get a 90% pass rate in order for the DA to qualify and the VRAD is turned up. If necessary the testers will locate bad sections of cable and they'll determine what and where it needs to be replaced. Then another crew will go out and replace it.

There are all sorts of problems that can cause poor service and intermittent problems even on pairs that are considered and tested "good". Sagging aerial cable can have water in it, sometimes when cable is placed they'll put aerial cable in the ground (which is never good since it isn't designed for that and is susceptible to water), if lightening hits a customers home it can run back through the phone drop and melt the cable which can be hard to find, squirrels chew on aerial cable and that can be hard to find, bad splicing modules, interference from power cables and equipment that runs above the aerial cable, etc. So when you think about it, is it better to have a service that relies on old antiquated technology like copper pairs that have been in place for decades or a dish that receives a signal from a satellite? AT&T knows this and has even stopped conditioning in certain parts of the US because it's more trouble than it's worth to even mess with this existing infrastructure.


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## peds48 (Jan 11, 2008)

MeanderingThroughLife said:


> *This is how U-Verse works:*
> AT&T knows this and has even stopped conditioning in certain parts of the US because it's more trouble than it's worth to even mess with this existing infrastructure.


I disagree with that though. Verizon FiOS managed to cover entire NYC (very large area with very demanding obstacles) and so gar they are and running.


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## slice1900 (Feb 14, 2013)

I'm not sure why conditioning should matter all that much now. Sure, for early DSL installs using CAP stuff like bridge taps were an issue, but DMT's line training does away with those problems by blocking out any problem frequencies.

When I was helping a friend who owned an ISP do some DSL testing back in 1997, I tried a half dozen modems over the course of a summer to see how they performed (he rotated them around those of us doing testing) The one crazy expensive first generation DMT modem he had ran super-hot, but got the full 8 Mbps it was capable of. The performance of the CAP modems was universally terrible, never managing over 3 Mbps and seeing a lot of errors. Then he brought out an oscilloscope, determined bridge taps were the problem, so he illegally climbed a couple poles in my neighborhood and snipped the taps off my line. After that I was able to get full speed and almost no errors with the CAP modems. The only change that made to the DMT modem was the debug output showing a few additional carrier frequencies passing training.


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## MeanderingThroughLife (May 31, 2014)

peds48 said:


> I disagree with that though. Verizon FiOS managed to cover entire NYC (very large area with very demanding obstacles) and so gar they are and running.


I know this for a fact. As a former employee they laid off about a 100 of us in my district. The job was slated for 3 years in order to condition all the crossboxes. The talk from the management and engineers was that they're thinking about going wireless instead of using the existing copper plant. Placing wireless nodes and transmitting the data to the customers premises, sort of like cell phones by my understanding. If you could see how bad the existing plant actually is you'd understand. You can have a straight run of cable going from the crossbox into a neighborhood that are all encapsulated terminals (dedicated pairs already) and the entire neighborhood would fail for BR9 anomalies. Which is just some sort of unknown signal loss. Also, why would they take VRADs that they purchased and then sell them back to the manufacturers at wholesale cost? Which is exactly what they did here.



slice1900 said:


> I'm not sure why conditioning should matter all that much now. Sure, for early DSL installs using CAP stuff like bridge taps were an issue, but DMT's line training does away with those problems by blocking out any problem frequencies.


Bridged taps kill the signal. Instead of it being a straight pipe to the house it will actually branch off and continue down a main road for another 1000' or more. These are usually taken care of at major splice points like where a 600 pair cable goes down a major road and then a 50 pair branches off to go down a side street say. The same 50 pair will go both ways. This has no effect on POTS lines but with DSL and U-verse it kills the signal strength.


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## peds48 (Jan 11, 2008)

MeanderingThroughLife said:


> I know this for a fact. As a former employee they laid off about a 100 of us in my district. The job was slated for 3 years in order to condition all the crossboxes. The talk from the management and engineers was that they're thinking about going wireless instead of using the* existing* copper plant.


Perhaps that was the problem. Verizon managed to run fiber all around town, so is doable if the ROI is there


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## slice1900 (Feb 14, 2013)

MeanderingThroughLife said:


> Bridged taps kill the signal. Instead of it being a straight pipe to the house it will actually branch off and continue down a main road for another 1000' or more. These are usually taken care of at major splice points like where a 600 pair cable goes down a major road and then a 50 pair branches off to go down a side street say. The same 50 pair will go both ways. This has no effect on POTS lines but with DSL and U-verse it kills the signal strength.


That wasn't my experience, but my bridge taps were only a couple blocks long. Even with 1997 era technology I got 8 Mbps on DMT and 7 Mbps on CAP (both maximum of the hardware at the time) on a 6k ft run over WWII era copper after the bridge taps were removed.

However, I got the full 8 Mbps on DMT even with the bridge taps in place! They didn't cause any issues with signal strength, the only problem was that they attenuated certain frequencies (based on the length of the bridge tap) but DMT's training phase learns that and would avoid using those frequencies.

Granted, modern DSL is using VDSL2 to attain far higher speeds, but it is still DMT and the distances are much shorter since FTTN is designed for endpoints to be no more than a kilometer from the fiber node. Perhaps the signal power is reduced since they share the line with telephone, while the technology I was testing at the time used a separate line (we ordered "alarm circuits" from the telco)


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## MeanderingThroughLife (May 31, 2014)

slice1900 said:


> That wasn't my experience, but my bridge taps were only a couple blocks long. Even with 1997 era technology I got 8 Mbps on DMT and 7 Mbps on CAP (both maximum of the hardware at the time) on a 6k ft run over WWII era copper after the bridge taps were removed.
> 
> However, I got the full 8 Mbps on DMT even with the bridge taps in place! They didn't cause any issues with signal strength, the only problem was that they attenuated certain frequencies (based on the length of the bridge tap) but DMT's training phase learns that and would avoid using those frequencies.
> 
> Granted, modern DSL is using VDSL2 to attain far higher speeds, but it is still DMT and the distances are much shorter since FTTN is designed for endpoints to be no more than a kilometer from the fiber node. Perhaps the signal power is reduced since they share the line with telephone, while the technology I was testing at the time used a separate line (we ordered "alarm circuits" from the telco)


DSL will still run fine with some in place but I have seen where techs will cut the pair dead to the field side and dedicate the CO side at the serving terminal for DSL to try to resolve customer issues. If the field side is still in place you could be having other problems on down the line where ever that cable is going after it hits your terminal. Sometimes your pair could even have a drop connected at another terminal going to another home on down the line, I've seen it before. It sometimes happens when they assign you a new pair that maybe some other customer was using in the past. The bridge taps have a greater effect on u-verse than the older DSL. Most terminals have half tap modules in place so that your pair is still going down the street past your home. Basically they half tap the entire terminal which like I said before is fine for what it was initially intended for, which is POTS. So if you go into that terminal and find the pair that you're on then cut out the field side it should boost your signal to some degree. Most of the time this isn't possible though unless you're being fed from a pedestal on the ground with a looped up cable. If it's a buried splice/stub or an aerial terminal there isn't much you can do.


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## mkdtv21 (May 27, 2007)

Does U-verse use any coaxial in their system at all?


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## dpeters11 (May 30, 2007)

peds48 said:


> Perhaps that was the problem. Verizon managed to run fiber all around town, so is doable if the ROI is there


My local phone company is doing the same thing, they are pretty much staking the future of the company on fiber.


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## Paul Secic (Dec 16, 2003)

veryoldschool said:


> I took a test drive of U-verse "figuring" the PQ would suck.
> It turned out not to, but their DVR sure did.


Their DVRS are horrid. I had U-verse in 2006 for a week. Went back to Dish.


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## Jasen (Mar 21, 2006)

I used to have [email protected] Uverse tv but I had to get rid of it and now I have Directv again


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## CTJon (Feb 5, 2007)

I had direct TV for many years and then moved to a place where I had no view of proper sky and since it was uverse community I signed up for Uverse. From a TV standpoint there is no comparison - Uverse was lacking features that DTV had years ago. The internet and phone was fine but the TV DVR was terrible in lack of features etc. Given a choice for me there would be no choice - DTV all the way and this is with features from 4 years ago. Uverse lacks even simple things like multiple favorite sets, buffering when not turned on let alone double buffering, etc. One of the most annoying was that they would keep adding channels and they'd appear on your favorites, etc. and you'd have to go onto each set and get rid of them - and they didn't like just add weekly or so but almost every day. The channels they'd add were things like adds for hair treatments for bald men - all advertising - what a pain.

I've since moved again - now on Time Warner (heading back to Directv in the next couple of weeks) - and Time Warner would make anyone look good. Bad feature set and horrible service - not that DTV is perfect but compared to the others it is really great.


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## SledDog (May 6, 2007)

To add one more post to this semi-dead thread... I changed to U-verse 2 months ago. My DTV account is suspended until the end of September, just in case I decide to go back. I've been with DTV for 7 years. I wanted to curb some of my costs and this was a way to do it. The U-verse DVR has some differences, they are minor. But sometimes these minor difference are big to some. Yes the lack more then one favorite can be a pain, but I don't use more than one favorite. Accessing the guide for that favorite is different, and I have my Harmony remote set to do it. The 30 seconds skip is 6 seconds, but the U-verse Fast Forward is just as easy for use. I have never had U-verse add any programming to my favorites. If you use the remove a channel function from the over all list and are using the over all list, it's like a the "channel I get list, with the ability to edit it, I could see how new channels would be added to it.

My profile is set for 4HD feeds, I'm 1800 ft from the VRAD. The picture quality is sometimes better then DTV and sometimes not. It kinda depends on the channel. To be quite frank, I was getting tired of the issues with my HR23-700 (need for reboots, picture freezing, poor sound quality and sometimes DVR issues created after downloading new firmware while I participated in the program that does not exist outside of that forum), the costs for HD and DVR, the MRV cost and the commitment requirements for upgrades. The rain fade issue never bothered me, even here in Florida. One thing I don't miss is the constant barrage of messages DTV send to the receiver. I've got only one message sent to the U-verse receivers, and that was to let us know a firmware update was done.

The U-verse On Demand runs faster and better than DTV's. The service tech's have been good and are company employees. With DTV, at least in my area, you never know who is coming to service or install your equipment. AT&T tech support is out-sourced for 1st tier troubleshooting, DTV's calls centers are not.

For me, the change makes sense, at the moment. I'm not big on sports, so that aspect did not influence my decision. I have a better tier of programming, at less of a cost than with DTV. Combining programming in internet access, dropped the overall cost of service. Even after my discounts are gone, (the have the same CSR thing as DTV, they will issue credits if asked) I will still be $40.00 a month ahead.

At this point, the cons of U-verse out weigh the pros of DTV, for me anyway.


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