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fg8578
join:2009-04-26
San Antonio, TX

fg8578

Member

San Antonio, TX: Sporadic U-Verse outages on Dec 4

I was trying to watch the Cowboy-Bears game last night and it was virtually unwatchable for about the first hour of the game due to U-Verse dropping its television signal in and out intermittently.

This was not a failure of NFL Network -- this was a U-Verse failure that affected every channel. There were times when all three lights on my STB went blank, then the power button went dark. I've had U-Verse about ten years and never have I had the number or duration of outages that I experienced last night.

This was in San Antonio. There was some light rain, but no electrical storms. Rebooting the STB and modem didn't help.

rolande
Certifiable
MVM,
join:2002-05-24
Dallas, TX
ARRIS BGW210-700
Cisco Meraki MR42

rolande

MVM,

There are dozens of reasons why a U-verse connection can get knocked out. There is a high likelihood your issue was local to your line and no one else was affected. Who knows...maybe someone new moved in who happens to be a big HAM radio nut and they did something to create a large amount of RF ground interference that was induced into their own copper which then bled across all the other adjacent copper in the same bundle and killed your line sync. Maybe the light rain got into a pedestal and worked its way into your copper pairs or another bridge tap splice. I can keep going and come up with probably another 5-10 legitimate scenarios that could cause intermittent sync failure.

fg8578
join:2009-04-26
San Antonio, TX

fg8578

Member

Yes, I understand that. But like I said, in ten years we never had such problems, and that applies to the POTS line we've had even longer (since 2003).

rolande
Certifiable
MVM,
join:2002-05-24
Dallas, TX
ARRIS BGW210-700
Cisco Meraki MR42

rolande

MVM,

U-verse hasn't been around for 10 years. It didn't officially launch in its first market until just over 8 years ago in San Antonio. Regardless, duration of your connection and perceived stability and availability do not insure your line could never be affected, as you have discovered. Assuming it was not a VRAD or routing/content distribution issue, a physical property of your line changed for some reason.

I had rock solid stable service for 6 months after moving into our new house. Then all of a sudden unexplained intermittent outages. Rebooting the RG would not force recovery. After several months of techs visiting and swapping out every component from the RG to all the wiring, inserts, and splices, to the outside wiring to the pedestal and the F2 pair from the pedestal back to the SAI, it came down to the port on the VRAD. They changed the port from an F card to a K card and all problems disappeared. Bad port. I upgraded to the pair-bonded Power Tier about 6 months later and they added a second port on the same card and similar results. The line never goes down. TV picture has been rock solid and I can always speed test in the 49-50Meg range.

This is why last mile copper sucks for high speed data delivery. It is too error prone and too susceptible to degradation from outside environmental interference. A perfectly good line can all of a sudden perform terribly through no fault of the customer or AT&T.