AT&T U-verse
With HD becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous, and wanting to move the TV locations in the house anyway, I decided it was time to try a new TV service. As it happened, I was considering AT&T U-verse when a salesman happened to come by. I liked the idea that even if the TV service didn't work well enough to keep, I'd still get a faster internet connection...so it seemed worth the hassle.
The installer was here yesterday.
Install took 6 hours. They give you a new home gateway which is a honkin' big box--a 2Wire device with AT&T branding. Does wireless and
provides several wired ethernet ports. Changing to my ESSID and WPA key was a snap. Unfortunately, they didn't want to put the gateway in the spot where I have my old one--a "crow's nest" about 10 feet up the wall in my family room--so I'll have to rearrange some wiring. I don't think they want their installers climbing the furniture....
The software running inside the set-top boxes is WinCE; I assume it's a version of MSFT's Media Center software. It doesn't look bad, but thaks to Google, its reputation preceded it so I knew to skip the HDMI cables. (There are lots of complaints about lockups, and the installer seemed to know about it. He gave me a set of component cables.)
They don't supply technical-level manuals, so I don't know what it means when the lights flash in various patterns. But it's day two and I'm on my second DVR box because the first one crashed repeatedly.
I signed up for the "Elite" package, up to 6MBits down/1 MBit up; since
I work-from-home most of the time it seemed worth it. speedmatters.org shows that
I'm currently getting a little more than that....with all 3 of my TVs
running (one of them showing Olympics in HD.) I think that the
gateway shows about 25MBits down/2 MBits up, so they're reserving the
lion's share for TV. Because of bandwidth limitations, you're currently limited to HD 1
stream, which should eventually be 2. You *can* watch the same HD show on several TVs at once, although I can't test that because I currently have only one HD set. I'm guessing they're waiting for better compression technology, rather than a bandwidth increase.
The DVR won't share recordings
with the other TVs, although again, that is supposed to change. Clearly the set-top boxes are networking amongst themselves, because they all show up as devices with DHCP addresses at the gateway. So I imagine that's also a software issue.
And, as you might suspect from a company who can't afford to alienate the content providers, there's a fast-forward but no commercial skip feature. MythTV has me spoiled.
I made them pull all new wires because I
didn't want my satellite system disturbed, in case the TV doesn't work well enough to keep. But they've been responsive about the issues, and right now things look good. Stay tuned and I'll update again after I've had a chance to test things a little harder.
Posted at 11:19AM Aug 21, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General |