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U-talk Peer-to-Peer Forums :
U-verse TV :
Equipment :
New U-Verse user's istallation from hell
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New U-Verse user's istallation from hell
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EdgarTB
Visitor
Posts: 2
Registered: 09-13-2007
Message 1 of 10
Viewed 8,477 times
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One of the users at uverseusers.com suggested I post this here so that maybe somebody from ATT can offer their opinion on my experience.
THE ORDER
Hello,
My name is Doug and I am a new U-Verse user in Norco, CA. This is a small city near Los Angeles that has just been added to the U-Verse service area. I am an Electrical Engineer and one of my duties for the last 19 years at work is to keep our intranet connected and secure so I have a little bit of experience with networking. Here is my story...
I was extremely happy when my wife told me that an ATT guy stopped by and said they were putting in a fiber optic network in my neighborhood. I was skeptical that this guy was legit because we don't even have high speed DSL (and probably never will due to geography in the area) and the guy would not leave a business card. He told my wife that he would return later when I was home.
My history of Internet access at my house is dialup, ISDN service, IDSL, and finally cable internet access. I was hoping to get rid of the cable company for good (I have Direct TV so I don't bother with their TV offerings).
I searched for ATT and fiber optic on the internet and found this site and references to U-Verse. I called ATT regular customer service phone number and it took about 20 minutes for them to call around and confirm that U-Verse was really in my neighborhood. They passed me on to the U-Verse customer support so I could have my questions answered.
Originally I wanted to get Internet only and they said, after talking to a manager, that since no DSL service was in my area, I could get Internet only U-Verse service, but I should check out the video service because it is great! They also told me that the door to door ATT guys had better deals so I should sign up with him.
Well the "ATT" guy showed up again, and after talking to him for a few minutes he fessed up and admitted that he worked for a company that was contracted by ATT to 'seed' a new area. He explained that this was why he wore an ATT badge, but could not leave business cards (they are forbidden to do so by ATT). Ok, cool at least I know now that it isn't some type of scam.
I showed him my house where I have a single computer hard wired to the internet, and WiFi network for some other devices and a single TV connected to DirectTV. I'm the perfect U-Verse convert because I don't have multiple TV's that could cause stream restriction problems as described in these forums. This guy gave me a little sales bull, but in general he seemed like a nice honest guy.
I was offered a free install, plus a free trail of the video service for 30 days to evaluate their product. His prices were lower than the website offers and he said this was part of his companies contract with ATT. The Internet prices were about $5 less then the website quoted prices so everything sounded great!
At this time I had my phone service with the cable company which was low cost, but also prone to problems and my wife hated it! So I wasn't opposed to switching my service back to ATT even though the same service would cost about 33% more. This representative signed me up for phone service and U-Verse at this point. One thing he wasn't complete honest about was my need to sign up that night. I was running late to a meeting that night and asked him if he could come back later when I heard it would take 30-45 minutes to get the order written. He said this was his last day in the neighborhood. So I was late to my meeting and I signed up for phone service, U400 package with Elite level High Speed Internet service. He wrote the following on my AT&T California Residential Product Worrksheet:
- U400 + Elite
- Total Monthly: $129
- Total Installation: $0
- Fixed Rates Month 2 Month
- Free TV 1 Month
- Free Install & Modem
- $50 bill credit (for phone service conversion)
- Plus $50 gift card ("They gave this to you extra because of all of the wait time
- Install Date: Thursday August 30th, 2007
- He also wrote a phone order and uverse order number on the sheet.
- Cost of Elite internet only $35/mo
I told the representative that I would test U-Verse vs my cable to make sure it was as fast as he claimed and if so, GOODBYE CABLE!!! With the service I get from the cable, the Elite level should be about twice as fast both up and down stream.
THE WAIT AND CONFUSION
I was very happy and I could hardly wait for this to be installed. I know, I'm a tech geek! My stereo receiver also gave up the ghost while I was waiting so I purchased a new AV receiver so now I'm set!
Oh, one problem. The Phone guys had to do their installation first and they could not make the August 30th date. I was rescheduled for September 6th for both the phone and U-Verse install.
My wife had a call from ATT on 8/31/07 asking if they could do the install that day. Unfortunately, my wife was busy that day so she said that they should keep the original 9/6 install date. They asked her what time was good and she said the 1-4pm slot was best for her. When I got home that night, I asked her if it was the U-Verse or phone guys that called? She didn't know and assumed that they were one and the same. I had read some threads on this forum about long installs and the representative I talked to said the U-Verse install could not start until the phone was finished and that it took a long time. This isn't good so I called ATT customer support. After waiting on hold for about 15 minutes, I was informed that my U-Verse install was not scheduled for 9/10/07 because of the late time of the phone install. After a long period on and off hold (over an hour) Tyson at the U-Verse support had everything fixed! The phone would be installed 9/5 at 8-12am and the U-Verse would follow on the 6th at 10-12am. Great! My cable period starts on the 7th, so I can still cancel it after testing and not pay another month!!!
The phone installer showed up as planned, seemed to know what he was talking about and got the phone service up and working! Great! one more day!
I was planning on leaving work early that day to watch the install and make sure it was done the way I wanted it to be done. At 12pm, I called U-Verse customer service (888-320-2167) number and was told they are on the way. The Rep said that they do not have any way to contact the techs in the field so I would just have to wait.
At 2:30PM I called the 800-288-2020 phone and after about 15 minutes on hold, they talked to dispatch and said that the tech would be there in one hour. I took the rest of the day off, and headed home to wait for the tech.
At 4:30PM I called back and waited 30 minutes on hold before I finally got back to the correct customer service reps. They said my son told the tech to come back Monday. Strange, my son is 6 and at school. After about an hour on the phone with CS, it was discovered that the tech was sent to an address in Santa Clarita, CA about 2 hours north on my house and knocked on a door there... They had my order confused with someone elses! They offered a Saturday Install 9/8 to make up for my troubles (also because I was not available on Monday). During this call I was given the dispatch direct phone number. Romey who answered this call was very professional and a credit to customer support. She could not understand how this got so messed up. She also suggested that I ask for an adjustment on my first bill.
On Friday, I called normal customer service to verify my Saturday install. After another 15+ minutes on hold, Josh told me that my install was set for Monday! I told him that this wasn't correct so he put me on hold again... After 20 minutes on hold, I had to hang up to do what I am paid to do. I decided to call the dispatch number directly and I talked to Kimmi who said everything was on for Saturday morning 8-10AM. About an hour later, I received a voice mail on my cell from Josh telling me it was MONDAY. I decided to ignore him because of whay Kimmi had told me.
Saturday Morning rolls around and nobody shows up. At 9:30 I call the dispatch number and after more time on hold, I am told that they don't have any record of a Saturday install and that they had record of a Monday install. After a little venting of my frustration, Nancy (the person I was talking to) told me that they had found an installer and he would be there a little later that morning.
Yes! My U-Verse is finally going to be installed!
THE INSTALL
Ok, at 10:30am a tech showed up at my house! I'm glad I was here, because I don't think my wife would have let him in the house sporting those tattoos and odd body piercings! Quick joke, how many body piercing are needed to install a U-Verse system?
Read on to find out.
Ok, so the tech shows up and he is obviously new. The visible body piercing count was only two, but these where on his ears with VERY LARGE holes. I'm old fashioned I guess, but I know it doesn't really say anything about what he knows... This guy was at my house for about 15 minutes and surveyed the site. He told me to remove my computer and move the roll top desk so he would have room to work. He left to do some work at the main box down the street.
About two hours later, two ATT trucks arrive. The installer is now accompanied by a young woman installer with 6 visible piercings. She seemed to also be new, but she appeared to know a lot more about what they were doing. Her install had been canceled so she was here to help!
This new installer informed me that there would be a $55 charge for each run in my house. I protested and told her that I was told that this was a "FREE INSTALL". She went back to her truck for about 10 minutes and then informed me that their manager said any new wires in the house would be $55 each. My TV is connected to a directTV tivo and there has never been cable in our family room. Now I'm pissed. My computer is currently connected to the cable system via a 20+ year old cable that has a lot of losses (probably the reason for my crappy cable service). I was planning on keeping my cable connection until I could confirm the speed and reliability of the U-Verse connection so I didn't want them steal that connection.
By this time, I was pretty pissed and told them that I wanted my free install and that they should do whatever work was included with the documents I signed with the original sales rep. They told me they would only install the TV and internet connection into my garage where the ATT wires enter my house. NICE!
About 4 hours later nothing was working and I think they had pretty much given up. They also had things to do that afternoon and were both arguing on who could leave. Eventually, a third technician was called and he arrived with only a single piercing (tongue). Now this guy knew his stuff. In about five minutes of listening in, I heard him question just about everything these two installer did on the installation. Wires were reversed, connections loose, and a bunch of jargon I didn't understand. After about 15 minutes, he went off to the off-site box with the first guy and came back saying that something was installed on the wrong circuit so it would never have worked!
Lucky for me, the first two technician bailed out and left the third guy to finish. He had everything functioning and got my video service partitioned. He didn't say anything about the location of the install I think because it wasn't his job. He was just helping out.
Here is a picture of my new entertainment center after they left and I had time to throw away the trash left by the first two installers.
http://dragonknoll.com/uverse/InstallComplete.jpg
Notice the nice finishing work done on the cables!
http://dragonknoll.com/uverse/CableArrangement.jpg
And how about the final modem placement?
http://dragonknoll.com/uverse/ModemInstall.jpg
Now the image quality is a little sub-par probably because the only TV in my garage was going to be thrown out years ago and I never got around to it. See below:
http://dragonknoll.com/uverse/ImageQuality.jpg
Finally, I have a family and I bet you can guess what my wife thought of her new office!
http://dragonknoll.com/uverse/WifeInNewOffice.jpg
So I bet you can imagine how depressed I was when I tested the link speed and found out that I was getting 1.5mbps down / 900kbps up on this setup! I gave up for the night and went to bed. On Sunday I called technical support and after a long wait on hold was told to clear my history, cache, and cookies to try and speed things up. Eventually, I got through to level 2 tech support (after another long hold period) and they discovered that I was setup as an "Express" account and the speed was consistent to that plan. Unfortunately, they could not do anything about it and I would have to call sales on Monday.
End of the saga...
Well Monday rolled around and I called the U-Verse phone number and after a long hold period got someone in sales to change my account settings. That evening I went home a did a of of speed tests using both my cable and U-Verse connections.
The bottom line is my cable (when it works) gets about 4300kbps down / 430kbps up consistantly using the tools on dslreports.com. This is the case for both wireless and wired connections.
The U-Verse install on the other hand had speeds as high as 5680kbps down / 919kbps up when hardwired and 4655kbps down and 892kbps up when connected wireless.
Unfortunately, the U-Verse connection does not appear to be as consistent as my cable. I also received test results as low as 3847kbps and 465kbps wired at the same general time. This connection, on this day, seems to have a lot of speed variation. Which I have not noticed with my cable connection (when it works).
So I need to decide if it is worth running cables myself to finish the install or if I should just call ATT and have them pick up their equipment. I really want this to work! I hate the cable company and it would be great to get rid of them. The only reason I moved my phone service to cable was because at that time, the phone company could not provide high speed internet.
What experiences have others had with the speed of an "Elite" connection? Was this just a bad day, or are the speed dip typical?
Thanks for the ear!
Doug
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09-13-2007 12:45 PM
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Re: New U-Verse user's istallation from hell
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 spd2demun
CL - Hi-Def Hero
Posts: 12854
Registered: 07-28-2007
Message 4 of 10
Viewed 8,407 times
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Wow! I wonder what ATT thinks about this install?
LOT8s Specialist and Home of the Wireless UFO Landing PadNOTE: I am NOT with AT&T no matter what you've heard; thank you, drive thru.
STANDARD DISCLAIMER APPLIES TO ALL POSTS --YMMV, YRMV, Take with a grain of salt!
No warranty is implied or given. No money-back guarantee.
UVERSE DIRECT: 800-983-2811
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09-13-2007 08:20 PM
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Re: New U-Verse user's istallation from hell
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Koolkid1935
CL - Net Czar
Posts: 2451
Registered: 07-27-2007
Message 5 of 10
Viewed 8,395 times
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Would it be better to give David an AT&T 'globe' so that people would better trust him?
Know Thyself
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09-14-2007 03:05 AM
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Re: New U-Verse user's istallation from hell
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spd2demun
CL - Hi-Def Hero
Posts: 12854
Registered: 07-28-2007
Message 7 of 10
Viewed 8,329 times
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It sounds like on another forum that he got lots of attention from ATT! They were not happy with how things went and are going to make it right. But I can't speak for Edgar, so hopefully he'll update us soon. 
spd2demun wrote: Wow! I wonder what ATT thinks about this install?
LOT8s Specialist and Home of the Wireless UFO Landing PadNOTE: I am NOT with AT&T no matter what you've heard; thank you, drive thru.
STANDARD DISCLAIMER APPLIES TO ALL POSTS --YMMV, YRMV, Take with a grain of salt!
No warranty is implied or given. No money-back guarantee.
UVERSE DIRECT: 800-983-2811
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09-14-2007 07:36 PM
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Re: New U-Verse user's istallation from hell
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Bob
Newbie
Posts: 1
Registered: 12-28-2007
Message 8 of 10
Viewed 7,136 times
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Doug, My name is Bob, I live in CT. AT&T has only recently made U Verse available to several areas of CT. One of which is mine. At first we had cable with a digital converter. Had that for a while, and all was good. However, once I purchased a HD Sony LCD, I came to find out that the digital converter wasn't converting everything from analogue to digital as I assumed, and nobody from the cable company ever told me. So, the analog channels on the HD tv were horrendous. I checked out Directv, and every channel was digital, so I went with them, but chose not to get the HD package because it would cost me an additional $10 a month, and at the time, there were only 6 or 7 HD channels. My all distance phone and the lowest grade of DSL were from AT&T. So, all was good again. For three years. Then, for some reason, sun flares and atmospheric interference made watching tv challenging during the Autumn months. Almost every twenty minutes the lower half of my tv pixalized.... or parts of the upper half pixalized....or the picture would simply freeze, and five seconds later catch up with the signal. It just so happened that U Verse had JUST come into our town, and I heard a lot of good things about it. So, I made the swap.
The install was in one day, but it DID take the whole day. The reason being, they had two guys working the install. One guy knew what he was doing, the other guy made it known to me over and over that he was new. It took 9 hours, and like your install, a third guy came in and took over. Within a half hour, everything was ready.
I still have the lowest grade DSL, I don't need anything more. After the first month's promotional offerings, I dropped down to U200. The movies on HBO and the other special channels are either old or repeated over and over, and I can't see the sense in paying for that service. One thing I am noticing, and I've called AT&T about twice is that football games on the HD channels freeze, and the commercials cut off. Not that I want to sit and watch commercials, but it's annoying none the less. They said that because of the 7 second delay in real time games, and because of the speed the fiber optics sends, the signal freezes, and it's something that they're working on. Don't know how much I believe that, because I'll switch to a local channel that's NOT a HD channel, but broadcasting the game in HD, and I don't have any problem with it.
I know the HD channels are free for a year as a promotion, and then $10 a month extra.... but because I'm getting the full package from AT&T, they've reduced my phone by $20. When I add what I was paying to Directv, and AT&T, I'm saving almost $40 a month. So once my free year of HD is over, I'm keeping it because I'm still saving over what I was paying, in addition, I'm getting more services as well as the DVR that records up to 4 channels simultaneously.
Out of the three times (including for the install) whenever I've called AT&T... I haven't had a wait time. So, maybe it's your area?
I do know that because the technology is so new that they are short of knowledgeable installers, and training as many as they can so as to keep up with the high demand.
Hope it all works out for you.
Cheers
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12-28-2007 09:44 AM
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Re: New U-Verse user's istallation from hell
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goot6936
Remote Controller
Posts: 1789
Registered: 10-08-2007
Message 9 of 10
Viewed 7,076 times
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Doug, don't give up! You're at the right place and there are certain people here who will make it right for you if they are given the chance to do so. =) Keep us updated because I'm curious to know how this gets turned around ok?
☺
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12-28-2007 01:50 PM
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Re: New U-Verse user's istallation from hell
[ Edited ]
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Pip
CL - U-Master
Posts: 8046
Registered: 09-30-2007
Message 10 of 10
Viewed 7,070 times
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There's more to it than just Doug's original post. Read this, but grab something to drink before you do...it's long, but mighty interesting for sure and I must say, when I read that, I had some second thoughts about getting Uverse installed, but decided to keep going with it. Glad that I did.  And, make sure you look at the before and after pix. A good installer can make all the difference in the world for sure.
goot6936 wrote: Doug, don't give up! You're at the right place and there are certain people here who will make it right for you if they are given the chance to do so. =) Keep us updated because I'm curious to know how this gets turned around ok?
Message Edited by Pip on 12-28-2007 05:20 PM
"I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory"
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12-28-2007 02:19 PM
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