AT&T U-verse → Re: Fiber comes to Berkeley CA? I'm tempted

Cable compression varies by company and even area. Typically, you can expect a 10-18Mbps MPEG2 encoding from cable. In my opinion, the 6Mbps MPEG4 AT&T uses is roughly equivalent to 10-12Mbps MPEG2. So by that metric, cable will always be as good or better than AT&T (assuming it doesn't drop below 10Mbps), but again, that's my personal opinion.

DirecTV uses MPEG4 (like AT&T) for HD content, but the bitrate is typically much higher than AT&T and variable based on content (fast moving content/sports gets higher bitrate, etc). People have seen bitrates anywhere from 6Mbps to 16Mbps (much better than cable).

For internet speeds, if you can reach a certain speed on U-Verse (lets say 24Mbps), you'll always get that speed 24/7 unless there are line quality problems. The only case this doesn't apply is what I mentioned earlier - HD streams can start to suck away bandwidth from your internet connection depending on the maximum bandwidth of your VDSL2 loop.

For pricing, you're definitely getting screwed going a la cart. I used to have DirecTV/Cable/TelCo phone. I saved >$100/month by going with a single company. The upside a la cart is that you can go with the best of each category (DirecTV for TV, Comcast for Internet, Comcast or AT&T for phone), but it's hard to justify the extra price just for that.

And AT&T is capping their delivery at 6mbps? Even if the loop can provide much higher?

Cable would not siphon off bandwidth from internet?

Do you know of any resources where I could find out the kind of speeds people are seeing in my area on AT&T? I guess I should check out the speedTest.net database. Any others?

It's not that the data is capped at 6Mbps, they could provide a higher bitrate if they wanted to. It's that AT&T is using a 6Mbps encoding profile on every channel, so the video itself is encoded at that max rate.

Cable uses separate channels for TV and Internet, so your speed does not decrease when watching TV. You can also have as many concurrent TV channels being actively viewed as you want without seeing any problems (assuming signal strength is good).

That's what I was asking... if the encoding itself is capped.

I actually just gave Comcast a call (after shoddy treatment on the chat channel ) They are rolling out X1 here... I just may have to take the plunge.

Thanks for your thoughts/knowledge TD (and DR for the more visceral response )

We switched from Comcast to UVerse for trial purposes. It was a horrible experience. The internet speeds of the two are light years away from each other. My parents are hard of hearing and the volume of UVerse was much lower than Comcast. I even set the volume to it's highest in their box, which didn't work.

After 4 days of AT&T, we switched back to Comcast..

Yes, cable quality varies by area. TWC HD looked pretty horrible here for a while, even worse than U-verse. MPEG-2 loses its composure pretty badly when bit starved.

U-verse encodings are capped at a specific rate, because they are only encoding the streams once for everybody (multicast). Given the limited size of the download pipe, they need to know for certain that the stream will not exceed a certain rate, because they cannot know what combination of channels the end users will select that will ultimately share a limited pipe. I read at one point AT&T was trialing slightly higher quality streams for certain profiles, but I don't know what happened with that.

With cable and satellite, channels are always broadcast together on certain pipes (transponders or QAM channels). In this case, encoders can detect when a high action scene needs more bits, and borrow them from other channels in the same pipe, which might be showing less action. They call this "stat-muxing".

What people are seeing in your area is not going to matter. It's based on your individual phone line's physical distance from the VRAD and the quality of your line. Assuming you line is in good condition you'll see stable speeds. Your distance will determine the max speed you can order.