I made the switch (finally!) from Dish Network satellite to AT&T’s new fiber based TV U-verse. The (second) installation took about 7 hours with 4 of those hours wasted because the installation tech went down the street to the VRAD to figure out why I wasn’t getting signal to my house. He discovered I was on the wrong port, whatever that means. After the signal came in the house they had to rewire a couple things in the house and I was off and running with the U200 TV package, Pro speed VDSL and the HD package.
Hit the read link to keep reading my impressions of the service.
*Warning, install details & nerd speak: The tech fed the signal through a copper pair (orange) into the house, then into the hardware gateway. The gateway is the brain of the U-verse system and the main signal goes to the gateway then out to the rest of the house. The tech then setup the gateway to feed the signal back to another copper pair (green), which then converted the signal to coax at the main cable box outside to feed the rest of the house with the U-verse signal over coax. This made the installation very clean without a need to drop another coax line into our office.
First Impressions
- The channel changing speed is phenomenal. Dish always had a lag when changing channels, but U-verse is very snappy.
- The picture-in-picture channel guide is a great feature. When you’re cruising through channels while watching another show you instantly see whether there is a commercial break instead of American Idol. This saves a lot of wasted channel changes!
- The full screen guide has some lag. Button presses sometimes take a split second to register, but it’s not that big of a deal. Channel guide information is loaded in real-time for future dates. This is a great feature because Dish relied on a program guide download nightly. If anything went wrong with the initial download it was a pain to get the data to refresh.
- The high definition picture is much better than standard definition, but lower quality than cable HD. The picture just isn’t as sharp as the cable HD feeds I’ve seen. And, no, it’s not my TV. However, the ability to watch HD in any room makes up for any small quality issues since we have an HDTV in our bedroom as well.
- The standard definition picture seems about the same as Dish. I had my TVs really tweaked to get the most out of the Dish picture so it’s going to take a little work now to get it tweaked for U-Verse.
- The 3mbps VDSL Internet service is fast! It is much faster than my old ADSL. The first noticeable difference is the faster ping time. Sites react much quicker due to the decreased lag. I was about 10,000ft from my CO on ADSL, which killed my speeds. On U-verse I can upgrade all the way up to 6mbps (10mbps coming soon).
- The 1mbps upload speed is welcome. I run an FTP server and the old 386kbps speed was excrutiating for large downloads.
- The ability to control the DVR from the web is great! I sat in bed with my laptop last night and rescheduled all the shows I had on the Dish DVR. The DVR software is not as flexible as Dish, but it’s also in its infancy. For example, on Dish I could tell it to only keep one episode. On U-Verse the system will keep everything until it needs to make room for more shows. However, the U-Verse DVR has a much better system for finding recorded content. You can view the entire list or by series, which is great.
- The channel lineup is much better than my old Dish lineup. I had the Top 150 package with Dish and the U200 U-Verse package blows it out of the water.
Those are my first thoughts. Keep in mind I’ve had about an hour to mess with the system so I haven’t been exposed to U-Verse’s potential shortcomings yet.
