Latest U-verse update

I’d had problem with U-verse VOIP when plugged into the POTS wiring in my house. A phone plugged directly into the U-verse gateway seemed to work fine. I figured that was just my problem.

I’d been having a lot of glitchiness with U-verse TV. It was intermittent. Then it developed this problem where on of the boxes would just stop getting video until you rebooted the box. Honestly, I suspected tech support wasn’t going to be very helpful.

Well, then I bought an on-demand movie. It wasn’t glitchy the way live (or DVR’d) TV was. This video just paused for about three seconds after playing for a second. None of the compression-artifact-like stuff. And the audio would only work if the video managed to keep from pausing for a few seconds. So, I called tech support.

I shouldn’t have waited. Once tier-one support had confirmed that I’d tried all the normal troubleshooting already, they passed me up to tier-two. Tier-two could actually look at stats from the set-top boxes and the gateway and see that there were lots of errors and where they were. They scheduled someone to come out the next day.

When the guy got here, he quickly assessed that the problems were the existing wiring in my house. Both the POTS wiring and the TV co-ax cabling had issues that were causing my problems with U-verse. He re-wired everything for me, and all seems good now.

So, two black eyes for AT&T here.

The guy who did the initial installation should have taken the time to take a closer look at the wiring in the house and fix it up. A quick installation is not a good thing if it isn’t a good installation.

Secondly, they scheduled the repair for sometime between 8am to noon. (I still don’t understand why the rest of us can schedule appointments at specific times but telephone and cable companies can’t.) The guy didn’t get here until at least 1pm. They didn’t bother to call and say he would be late.

But I was very impressed by both the telephone support people and the technician that came out. When I have actually called AT&T, they’ve gotten issues fixed. I shouldn’t have put off calling them.