U-Verse

[Caliga]

My shitty little Motorola 2210 DSL modem finally died yesterday so I got a tech coming out this afternoon to install U-Verse FiOS and hook me up with a residential gateway.  I'm leaving work early to let the guy in so if he doesn't show or is late imma have to choke a bitch.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

U-Verse FiOS

Did AT&T merge with Verizon yesterday and I somehow missed it?

[Caliga]

Oops. U-Verse fiber optic or whatever the fuck it is then.

[MadBurgerMaker]

I dig it.  Make sure they don't try to give you an old DVR with a shitty amount of storage space if you're getting the TV service too.  Demand 500GB at least.

[Caliga]

Nope, I'm just getting internet (also have at&t for smartphones).  So far, so good.  speedtest.net shows me getting 12.41 mbps down, and 1.5 up, which is a big improvement over the old DSL service.

It came with a router/wireless gateway, and it was a bit of a challenge to make it work with my repeater, but I have it up now.  No problem connecting any other device to it.  I'm not sure whether I'll hook my wireless router up to it... I might, since the gateway is only capable of 802.11g, and my router is a dual band n.

[derspiess]

We have neither U-Verse nor FiOS in Cincy.  We just have Cincinnati Bell Fioptics, if you can get it.  My brother who lives a couple miles from me has had it for ages (data only-- he's a DirecTV fanatic) but who knows when we'll get it.  I may not pull the trigger when it becomes available, but it'll be nice to at least have a viable choice vs. cable.

[katmai]

We have neither U-Verse nor FiOS in Cincy.  We just have Cincinnati Bell Fioptics, if you can get it.  My brother who lives a couple miles from me has had it for ages (data only-- he's a DirecTV fanatic) but who knows when we'll get it.  I may not pull the trigger when it becomes available, but it'll be nice to at least have a viable choice vs. cable.

Wish had such choices. DSL  or cable is all there is and so costs are crazy.

[Caliga]

I'm not quite sure how U-Verse works technically.  The dude who came to my house yesterday had to do something out on the street at the junction box or whatever you call it, and then I had to choose a specific phone jack to be re-purposed as a data jack, and he pulled the plate off the wall, did something to it. and then screwed it back on.  But the new gateway still connects to the RJ11 jack via a phone cord.  With DSL, I could plug my modem into any phone jack I wanted and it worked.  Also, with DSL I had to put this filter thing on conventional/POTS phones before I plugged them into the wall, but with U-Verse that apparently isn't necessary any longer.

[DontSayBanana]

I'm not quite sure how U-Verse works technically.  The dude who came to my house yesterday had to do something out on the street at the junction box or whatever you call it, and then I had to choose a specific phone jack to be re-purposed as a data jack, and he pulled the plate off the wall, did something to it. and then screwed it back on.  But the new gateway still connects to the RJ11 jack via a phone cord.  With DSL, I could plug my modem into any phone jack I wanted and it worked.  Also, with DSL I had to put this filter thing on conventional/POTS phones before I plugged them into the wall, but with U-Verse that apparently isn't necessary any longer.

If you've got a couple minutes, this does a pretty good job of explaining the fiber optic conversion process: http://www.bricklin.com/fiosinstall.htm

Major difference I can see is that this guy pretty much had his whole house (sans business lines, which I take to mean dual-purpose fax lines, but he isn't clear) plugged to a fiber media converter (named very descriptively- converts fiber optic signal to an electrical signal that the modem's RJ jack can accept) at the telephone box; it sounds like your installer used a smaller FMC going straight to that particular wall jack.

[OttoVonBismarck]

U-Verse is "fiber to the node" instead of "fiber to the home." Verizon FiOS is "fiber to the home." So FiOS will have higher speeds, but U-Verse will beat the pants off of typical DSL and get speeds up to 24 Mbps. Once the fiber connection gets to the network station / node near your house, it then travels over the same old wires as your DSL connection did. This would be a bottleneck, but there is also another new technology involved here that allows for higher speeds over traditional copper wires. This new technology means the phone lines in your house have to be done a bit differently, which is why unlike with DSL you cannot just use any old powered phone jack for your U-Verse connection. If you want to change the location of your U-Verse gateway you have to know how to do the wiring yourself or call an AT&T tech back out to the house.

Interestingly some U-Verse customers actually get fiber to the home, for the same price as anyone else, and they get higher speeds. This appears to be going on at random, as AT&T decides to run fiber all the way to homes in select places. The only place they are doing it as part of a widespread deployment is in Austin, where the U-Verse branding is being used for their complete fiber to the home Gigabit rollout designed to compete with Google Fiber there.

There's another new technology coming down the pipe that can support 100-500 Mbps speeds over copper wire over short distances, paired with the existing fiber-fed nodes it's expected in 4-5 years AT&T could (if it chose) offer 100-500 Mbps packages to customers without running fiber all the way to the premise.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Anyway, we have the 24 Mbps U-Verse package and it works fine. The downstream is lower than the 50 Mbps cable setup I had a few years ago, but this is $65 or something a month whereas the cable was $100/mo before factoring in TV service. I ended up dropping all cable, picking up U-Verse internet and going with DirecTV for video. I was still heavy into MMOs when I made the switch, and it was primarily driven by bad ping time and disconnects from cable, which I had none of those with U-Verse ever and much lower ping time. If it was just me I'd probably cancel all video service and just rely on my large library of media + Hulu + Netflix + Amazon Prime, but with a kid around it's a good thing to have some channels to let her watch and etc.

From what I can tell, U-Verse video is basically the same price as you'd pay for DTV or Cable when they are "off special", they were giving pretty strong incentives here when I got the internet service (I think like 50% off monthly service, + a $200 preloaded debit card as incentive), but I decided to go with DTV. U-Verse probably has the advantage that as long as your house has power, you'll have TV service whereas satellite is known to go out in heavy rain or snow (esp if the snow is allowed to build up on the dish.) But because the U-Verse TV product is 100% IP based, my research told me that quality can go from basically "perfect" to "pixellated" based on network usage. So if you're doing something intensive on your home connection, your TV quality degrades and I'm not a big fan of that as a concept.