All Sorts Of Problems With AT&T U-Verse
When we switched from Dish Network to AT&T U-Verse for our television needs, we had some pretty high hopes. I had expected the U-Verse to behave at least as well as the service we got from the Dish Network. Maybe possibly be better, since we never had on-demand shows before. Boy, was I disappointed. Within a week of setting up the new service, we needed new hardware and suffered a ton of problems, some minor and some major.
The first problem was that the DVR shuts down if you don’t use it very often. Not only can you not record shows or view recorded shows, you can’t even pause live TV. To fix it, you have to unplug the box, wait ten seconds, then plug it back in. Ten minutes later, after it has rebooted, you can record shows again. The cause was that we put the main box in the basement, which got very little use. The upstairs television, which we use all the time, suffered for it.
We ordered a replacement DVR unit from AT&T and then put that one upstairs. This seemed to fix the problem, for the most part. We still see some stuttering in the picture. The video will just freeze for a moment, then continue. I have read that this a common problem with U-Verse due to digital bandwidth problems. Our Internet speed is set to 12 kBs, so this really should not be an issue. Maybe it’s the DVR stuttering? Given the flakiness of the recording software, I wouldn’t doubt it.
The on-demand service has a terrible interface. It’s almost not worth using because it’s so difficult to find shows that you want to watch. One would expect to choose a program from a convenient list of available shows. That is not the case. You first pick a genre type, then find the channel that the program is on. The list is not in alphabetical order, so you have to scroll through all of the entire list to find the one you want. I find that it’s always at the end.
There’s also no guarantee that a show on regular television will be available on demand. Usually, if it is, only the last one or two episodes are available. But good luck finding them, because there’s no search feature either. It’s painful to search through the whole service just to not find the program at all. People make their living developing user interfaces like this, so why can’t AT&T hire someone to build something decent?
Additionally, their channel guide is awful. On the Dish Network, you could cycle through several guides by simply pushing the “Guide” button again. We used the “Subscribed” guide as our default since we don’t care about channels that we don’t get. Chrissy also set our family’s favorite channels as a custom guide. U-Verse is much more complicated. The default channel guide is a list of every available channel and other guides are buried in the terrible menu interface under “Channel Shortcuts”.
The DVR menu also leaves much to be desired. The Dish Network allowed you to organized your shows into custom folders. Also, when multiple shows of the same series were taped, they were automatically put in a folder together. Not so much with U-Verse. We recorded ten (Adam West) Batman episodes on New Year’s Day and now they are individually listed out in our DVR list. We have to scroll around the numerous Batmans to see any other shows that were taped. Our list of recorded shows has become tedious.
Another problem that we have is that the hardware simply stops working. We’ll be watching a show on television and the unit will simply turn off. We get a black screen, sometimes accompanied by a loud clicking noise. Again, we have to unplug the machine, wait ten seconds, plug it back in and then wait for it to reboot before we can continue watching our show. This doesn’t happen nearly as often as when the unit was downstairs, maybe once a week, but it’s still annoying.
We never had problems like this with the Dish Network hardware. In fact, the last Dish box that we received was far superior to what we currently we have from AT&T. I know that the Dish Network box had a radio controlled remote, which means that you didn’t need a direct line of sight between the remote and the box. You have no idea how much trouble we had over Christmas, because part of the Christmas tree was between my favorite spot on the couch and the AT&T set.
It has been difficult getting used to the new television set up, but I’m not sure if it’s worth switching back. We have all of our services bundled now and that gives us a decent savings every month. Is it worth all the suffering? Maybe not. But I’m hoping that it will get better over time. I’m finding my way around the new controller and getting over the minor inconveniences of the service.
I adore u-verse. I switched from Comcast in September 2010 and haven’t even considered looking back.
Your internet speed (12Mb/s, not 12kB/s) is irrelevant when it comes to your TV speed. U-verse allocates a non-configurable percentage of your bandwidth to TV, and let’s you buy up to the rest of it for internet speed. You can log into your u-verse router and…somewhere on it (I forget offhand) it’ll show you your total available bandwidth. It’s either gonna be 24Mb/s or 32MB/s if you’re close enough to a fiber drop. It always keeps 4-8 available for TV, though. Your purchased internet speed has -zero- effect on your TV experience.
The thing that’ll impact you is how close you are to a fiber drop. U-verse is a hybrid fiber/copper system. The fiber drop has to be within a mile of your house to work, and the closer it is the better the speed and performance would be. For example, I’m about 800 feet from my fiber drop and my performance is stellar. I’ve got 32Mb/s total, 24 to internet, 3 concurrent HD streams + 5 SD, etc. It’s awesome. A tech would be able to tell you how close to the fiber drop you are.
If you’re really close to a drop, you’ll be getting 32Mb/s total on the router, and you -should- be better. Farther away or less peformance? You’re in bad shape. You may need to call a few times to bitch if it’s below 24. It took me about 3 days to get everything set up, but once I did it was smooth sailing. They had to do…something. Update something on the network end to bump it up to normal speed, I was only sitting at 16Mb/s down for the first couple of days and the service was awful – TV was jerky and dropping out, network access was terrible. It was horrible. But once they resolved it, I jumped to 32 and it’s been awesome ever since. Get into the router and confirm your speed there, then call and scream bloody murder if it’s under 24. Also, find out how close you are to the fiber. If your’e under 2,000 feet, you should really have 32Mb/s there. Scream about that as well.
I will agree that the box freezes on occasion, but for me I need to restart it maybe every 2-3 months. Once a week is not acceptable.
The interface is, admittedly, not the best, but I’m also not seeing the issues you’re seeing. For example, my DVR will group recorded shows into a folder. I can just record things directly off of the TV listings grid (including setting up series recordings). Search is fine – hit Menu, then go down a couple notches to “Search”.
Maybe you’ve got an older software rev on the box? I wouldn’t know how to force it to update, though. And I can’t remember if mine started out with those limitations and they were resolved, or it never had them. Regardless, that sounds like old software to me.
Finding on demand content still sucks royally, though.
Customer service is so-so at best, but I’ve never had to deal with them beyond the first few days of set up. Everything else I’ve handled myself through their website.
That’s good information, thanks! Unfortunately, we’re nowhere near the fiber drop. In fact, they had to install a repeater box in our basement. If and when they get a drop closer to my house, I’ll have to call them and get hooked up again. I’ll check on the router to see what our total speed is. I’m not optimistic though.
Michael