Great product and price - lousy customer support
Written: Jun 23 '09 (Updated Jul 20 '09)
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Pros: Great picture quality, user interface, whole-house DVR, internet.
Great price and quality.
Cons: Terrible customer service and support
Whole-house DVR limitations
The Bottom Line: Go get U-Verse.
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| hman326's Full Review: AT&T U-verse |
We switched to U-Verse earlier this year from Comcast after it became available. Comcast was so expensive that by bundling our (old analog) home phone, cable w/2 DVR boxes, and internet, the combined U-Verse package was nearly $100/mo cheaper. No, that is not a typo: $100/month cheaper. (OK, I also dropped HBO.)
On top of that, the quality of the cable (images and user interface) is superior. Quality of internet and phone have been the same or better, which is to say, excellent with no outages or issues.
The U-Verse "whole house DVR" is a mixed bag, better in some ways and worse in some.
- Better: watch any recorded show on any tv. Watch part of it on one and continue on another. User interface is better, more intuitive, easier to use. Plus, Comcast charged $10/mo for every DVR box you have, which adds up fast to highway robbery.
- Worse: You can only pause/rewind live tv from the "main" unit. This is cumbersome. [A slight workaround is possible... if you are watching live tv and know you will want to pause it occasionally (e.g. sporting event), go to main unit, set it to record, then go back to other tv and watch it in dvr-play mode so you can pause/rewind.]
Love the 30-second skip forward button, but they just changed it so it's not instant anymore... i.e. they just made a good feature worse without warning.
We did once randomly lose all our recordings with no way to recover. Happened once on Comcast too.
Internet: Seems great. The cable-modem/router box comes with built-in wireless internet, which is much better than the wireless router I had before. My old one would get disconnected from Comcast regularly and I had to manually reboot everything. This never happens now. And signal is better through my house than before.
Internet speeds: I tried upgrading to a faster speed, then dropped back to "pro". never saw a difference with my mostly-casual internet use, including some youtube etc.
Phone: great, no issues at all.
We have one problem in that one remote tv seems to lose signal and flip out to black screen and then back in a second or less. Might be something about settings on the tv (720i or 720p or ????) but I haven't figured out why it does this. Kind of annoying. Happens a few times per hr, more during commercials.
One Big Negative: ATT has perhaps the worst customer service and support in history. Good luck calling and getting anything satisfactory. Prepare to be transferred all over the place to random wrong departments who can't help you or who insist they have no record of you calling before. They are surly and unfriendly at best.
Also: do not expect to get your rebates and referral rewards; they seem to try every possible thing to avoid getting them to you. After referring someone 4 months ago I still have nada, and every time I call I get the "we will resend, please wait 2-3 weeks". The excuses are beyond laughable. It is an absolute joke and almost to the point that I would cancel just for the aggravation.
I would recommend that someone in your household be somewhat technical to self-diagnose and fix issues, because calling them is pointless.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 129/month
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Epinions.com ID:
hman326
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Reviews written: 1
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