Aside from the
recent compression bit, we haven't heard a whole lot of negative things about AT&T's U-verse. In the same breath, we'd like to add that we haven't heard a tremendous
amount of praise either, which leads us to believe it's about as good as every other middle-of-the-road carrier out there. Clearly, those assumptions are remarkably misguided, as AT&T has pumped out a release tooting its own horn over the J.D. Power and Associates 2008 Residential Television Service Provider Satisfaction Study. In the three regions where it was critiqued, U-verse TV ranked highest in customer satisfaction, with the service receiving particularly high marks in the "offerings and promotions factor and the performance and reliability factor." So, the question beckons: agree, or disagree?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
looseinthedeuce @ Oct 2nd 2008 1:57PM
Disagree. I tried it and the HD picture quality was worse than cable. Over-compression = Failure. Stop comressing a signal which is already compressed and bump the bitrate back up. If all you have is analog TV, you'll be fine. But the HD looks horrible on a 56" screen.
t1c0 @ Oct 2nd 2008 2:40PM
The HD is and has always been great since my install DEC 06, I have a 70" LCD RPTV XBR and 40" LCD XBR, the picture is awesome on both.
GhostDoggy @ Oct 2nd 2008 3:09PM
I cannot imagine paying AT&T for over-compression. Of course, if you are blissfully ignorant then you desreve what little you get. :)
Michael @ Oct 2nd 2008 3:15PM
I love my uverse service. 100x better than Charter, and it never goes out.
I have a 50" and HD seems fine. Sure it is compressed but it aint that bad.
Big Sam @ Oct 2nd 2008 3:49PM
Compared to cable, I'm sure Uverse looks awesome. When I got DirecTV I was surprised that I could see a noticeable improvement in HD picture quality over Time Warner on my 61" TV.
looseinthedeuce @ Oct 2nd 2008 4:58PM
Nope. When compared to standard 2:1 HD compression on cable (basically equal to OTA HD bitrates), U-verse looks bad. They take 15-20mb/s MPEG2 and COMPRESS IT to 8mb/s MPEG4. Not only does it look bad, but the facts back it up. I realize you may not need the full 15mb/s when at MPEG4, but the fact that AT&T is transcoding a signal degrades the quality. If they were getting an uncompressed or even "lightly" compressed 30mb/s MPEG4 (Blu-ray quality) signal, fine...but they aren't.
.
. . It looks bad.
Q.E.D.
Mitch @ Oct 2nd 2008 7:08PM
Did side by side comparison of Dish vs Uverse. When I asked the Uverse guy what was wrong with my picture, he put a call in and management told him that was the way that it looked.
I showed him the difference, and even the Uverse employee said "Well, I guess you really can't switch then." Sent my boxes back immediately.
Would have been great because I use them for all of my services, and it is cheaper.
If it looks better than your cable HD, the cable company has done something on the order of fraud.
Dexter Antonio @ Oct 2nd 2008 7:11PM
Definitely better than cable (Comcast in New Mexico). Even for SD channels, picture quaility is much better.
Plus the unique features from U-Verse, total home DVR and the PIP channel browser, makes me a happy customer
Sean Bramlett @ Oct 2nd 2008 10:34PM
I have had U-Verse since July 2008, and have it hooked up with F.T.T.H. type connection and don't have any compression issues. I have got a 73" DLP and not seen 1 problem at all. We have 3 HDTV's in the house here, granted can only watch 2 of them at anytime in HD, but other than that, the service is excellent. Comcast here in the Houston area, has the suckiest HD Channel Lineup for it being the 4th largest city in the nation. They only have 26 HD Channels here including Local Channels in the Houston Area. Then only have 4 of the Premium Channels offered here also.
Their HD VOD does Rock though, but thats when it works as well.
During the recent Hurricane we had here in the Houston area, I had a whole home generator and when it came on Saturday morning when the hurricane was coming in, I never lost U-Verse service for the 5 days I was without power and running on generator. Everyone Else in the neighborhood has Comcast still, and since their Amps need power to run and they dont have any battery backup, they had no service till the lights came back on!
KUDOS to AT&T for the terrific service during the storm.
I even lost my landline and the U-Verse still worked too.
Thanks for listening.
Sean
shane @ Oct 26th 2008 8:23PM
what is f.t.t.h.
Phil @ Oct 2nd 2008 10:52PM
DirecTV and Dish HD are going to be better for reasons that should be obvious. All those reasons that guy didn't like UVerse from the top he could have found out before purchasing so all that seems to be is a uneducated consumer, there are choices for everyone, but everyone point he made seems unfounded. The HD on demand will obviously come with time, and is already available for some new movie rentals. Did comcast have HD on demand the first year they were available or as soon as they had ondemand? No. Give things time to improve before you get all worked up about a interface and menu colors.
Joe Manning @ Oct 4th 2008 6:33PM
Please allow me to fill the "we havent herd bad stuff about uvers" void.
I am a uverse u400 customer.
On a power outage the box dies, all your settings, including resolution and aspect ratio reset, and waitng for it to boot up takes about 15-20 minutes.
The interface is retarded.
There is no HD on demand.
There is a delay from room to room, so during the olypics I could hear who won in the other room before it hit ours.
The remote sucks.
The only benifit is being able to preview a chanel in a small window befrore you decide not to watch it, and the dvr in different rooms.
WK @ Oct 5th 2008 9:04PM
I work as a tech support rep for U-verse and IMO the service is a little over-arching, we support the whole service from bad wireless internet connections to picture quality issues, but in my experience the people who get a good signal never have a problem, and the people who get a bad signal will have loads of problems, we get accounts of people who have already called tech support 20 times since they were installed 2 months ago, but at the same time I've had a few calls where the person just needed to reset their password and hadn't called once in the entire ~18 months they had had the service.
Basically if you have to have technicians come out for picture problems more than about 4 times in the first 2 months, stick around long enough to get the rebates and the promotions, then drop the service
mike @ Oct 6th 2008 10:53PM
absolutely absurd. Set top boxes in California have known, acknowledged HDMI problems, Audio dropouts that make listenting to music and concerts a serious problem, flakey box with slow response to the remote...