So a month ago our Time Warner Cable (TWC) promotional period ended and our bill went from $109 to $140 for just cable TV (with HBO) and 6Mbit Internet. This has happened before and we simply called to get on another promotional rate. Although, this time they did not have a promotional rate…they initially offered to lower our bill by $1.25 if we signed a one year contract. Obviously, we did not bite on that. They managed to take $5 off our bill with no string attached. I still was not satisfied and informed the agent that they would be losing a customer soon.
I then set out to price out all of the other options for Northeast Ohio – Dish Network, DirecTV, and ATT. Dish has a really cool TV service called TurboHD which only gives you HD channels and only the ones you want. Sadly though, they were missing a couple channels that were deal breakers for us. DirecTV had all the right channels plus NFL Sunday ticket, but sadly they wanted a ton of money upfront for our cable boxes. Even without paying monthly for the cable boxes I found that DirecTV would be in the same range as Time Warner in terms of price – that left us with ATT.
ATT has a TV/Internet/Phone bundle under their uverse program. The idea behind uverse is that your phone, TV, and Internet signals are all sent over your phone lines. We priced out with them at $160.00 a month for everything (including phone, which we had been paying $62.00/month on top of our Time Warner bill). This was a huge savings. They promised us a high speed internet connection, and 4 TV streams. They made it sound as though we would be getting 4 HD streams, but more on that later. We setup our install appointment for Monday.
Monday:
8 AM: ATT Installer Arrives
The first thing he tells me is that we only get one HD stream with uverse. This was not explained at all during our sales call. I admit, I should have researched this before signing up. In all honestly though it didn’t cross my mind since with Time Warner you can get a ton of HD streams – I never thought twice about it. Having 4 HD TVs in the house, 1 HD stream is a little tight.
He runs some simple tests outside and finds that our lines need some work done to them. He puts in a request for a repair technician to come out and fix the lines. Why they don’t train one person to do everything…I don’t know.
10AM: Repair Guy Arrives
The repair guy comes out “fixes” the issue. We said we were running at 85% bandwidth, but he lowered it to 50% bandwidth. He then told me the install guy should be out shortly.
12PM: Installer Returns
The install guy comes back out and I help him make all the connections throughout the house to get things working. We had to disconnect our Time Warner since ATT -uverse can use the same lines to send the TV signal out to the TVs.
3PM: Finish Install
It took us a few hours to finish the install, but we eventually got everything up and running. The technician told me to call ATT and request a 2nd HD stream…they typically give you one if you have a good enough signal. He leaves. I pick up the phone to call and immediately hear tons of static. Not a good start to our service. After about 30 minutes getting transferred around I get someone on the line who says they can not give us a 2nd HD stream without a technician’s ticket saying it is OK. Our tech just left….
I made an appointment for Thursday for someone to come out and see about the static on the line and the 2nd HD stream.
6PM: First Outage
At this point I have blown an entire vacation day working with ATT. Not really what everyone has in mind when they think “vacation”. Right as I sat down at my computer the Internet goes out. I walk down stairs to find the service light went out. I am fairly familiar with losing service (I did have TWC…) so I just unplugged the router and plugged it back in. My service came back and the world was happy again.
Tuesday:
Everything was working well all day long, until….
4PM: 2nd Outage
The TV, Internet, and phone all lost service. We called ATT and they went through a bunch of tests with us – resetting the router, changing the connection types, testing the port on their server, etc. They determined a technician had to come out to take a look at the issue. I told them about our Thursday appointment and they bumped us up to Wednesday evening.
Wednesday:
Still no service. Luckily (kind of), my vacation was over and we had Internet at work.
7:30PM: Technician Arrives
I explain to him what has been going on and what the current theories are. He takes the router outside and hooks it directly up to the lines from ATT (to verify it isn’t an internal wiring problem). He comes back and explains that the repair person who came out on Monday didn’t actually fix the lines, he just put a bandage on it by “reducing the profile”. I don’t know exactly what that means, but at this point I was just happy to hear someone with a solid theory. He calls him boss and sets up an appointment for someone to come out Thursday morning.
8:30PM: Technician Leaves
We still don’t have Internet, TV, or phone…great.
Thursday:
As I woke up at 7:48 I realized we didn’t get the ATT people our cell phone numbers (since our phone isn’t working). We call ATT to have them put this on our ticket. After being transferred literally seven times we get no where. We call the cell number of the technician that was at our house the previous night…on his day off. Of course we woke him up, but I really appreciated him even answering his phone. He gets a hold of his boss and gets us an appointment for the afternoon – he explains that the request went in to late the previous night and no one “accepted it”.
11AM: Repair Man Arrives
The line repair guy spent the majority of the afternoon (until 2:30) working on the lines outside. He was confident that he fixed everything, but we didn’t have time to check. We had a meeting setup at 3PM.
5PM: Arrive Home
We arrived home at 5PM to find that our services were not fixed. We called ATT and they send someone out to take a look at things.
7PM: Technician Arrives
The tech finds that the guy in the afternoon left a couple lines loose. He tightened them up and our service came back online.
11PM: Service Outage
Our service drops again. I go outside to switch things back to TWC. When I go into the computer room I see that ATT has service again. My dad and I begin to disconnect and reconnect cables one by one to see if we can narrow down what is causing the problem. We find that disconnecting the TV line to my room makes everything work. I suspect that there is voltage building up in the line somewhere – it would explain why I could feel something odd on the line.
Monday: Technician Arrives
Our final technician came out and took a look at our setup and found that there was noise in our power signal. Apparently the ground wire was not set properly and the gateway is highly sensitive to this. This theory also explains the voltage I was feeling over the line. We ran a new cable to another room and hooked everything up. Everything began to work.
Two Weeks Later:
Since then we have had only minor outages, but nothing more than a few minutes at a time. After all the dust has settled here are my thoughts:
We have 2 HD streams and 2 standard streams. I have noticed that the picture quality on both the standard and HD streams is higher than with TWC. ATT uses MPEG-4 compression for the video, which gives a solid picture. We have 4 TVs in our home (all HD). It will be interesting to see how our DVR setup will work in the fall. Each of us like different shows, some of them might have to be recorded in standard instead of HD. This isn’t a big deal for the comedies/sit-coms, but hopefully the times work out so Idol,24, and other high motion shows can all be recorded in HD.
The single DVR is great for watching recording anywhere in the home. This will prove to be a lot more useful when the fall approaches.
The Internet (Elite 6 MB) has been working fine as well. I couldn’t tell the difference between it and TWC while playing games or downloading large files.
We did switch our phone service back to the land-line…something about having our phone connected to our Internet made us uncomfortable. Having the Internet drop about 10x in the past week confirmed these concerns. ATT agreed to give us the land-line at the same price…you just have to ask nicely.
Let me know if you have any questions!
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