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bswift
join:2015-04-29
Santa Cruz, CA

bswift

Member

AT&T U-verse Fiber in Santa Cruz, California

Welcome to a thread for discussions of AT&T U-verse Fiber service in Santa Cruz, California.

As far as I know, AT&T fiber has only been deployed to the Seabright area of Santa Cruz.

If you are able to order it in other areas, mention it here and on the Gigapower Mega List at »Gigapower [Fiber] - Mega List - Deployed/Being Deployed
bswift

bswift

Member

I’ll start by sharing my experiences…

In October of 2016 I noticed AT&T stringing new cables on the telephone poles and installing beige curbside boxes. I assumed they were just upgrading wiring, since previously the max u-verse offering was 24 Mbps DSL. I was quite surprised when in April a check of services available to me showed U-verse Internet 1000 was now an option.

After chatting online with an AT&T rep to get all the questions I could think of answered,
I placed my order for triple-play service on April 29th, with the install schedule for 9am
on May 8. (I wanted a morning appointment because I expected the install would
run long given the physical layout of the property. Pole is 50’ down street from property,
and cables come in underground from pole, and terminate at back of complex, but
my unit is at front of complex.)

Installation:

AT&T truck arrived around 8:50, and installer called me at exactly 9am.

Installation took all day (as I was expecting). Finished up a little after 5pm.
Through the day the technicians kept me posted on progress.

What was done:
• A fiber was pulled in from the pole, underground, to a ONT(?) box installed at the back
of my 3-unit complex. This is where other utilities enter the premises.
• A power supply (with internal battery) was installed on the wall inside my garage and
a cable was run in the crawlspace to the ONT.
• Cat5e cable was run in the crawlspace from the ONT to a jack they installed behind my “entertainment center”.
• A 5268AC gateway (without battery) was connected to the ONT jack.
• A IPH8010 DVR was connected to the gateway
• My POTS base station was connected to the gateway with extension cables they provided.

Minor install glitches:
• Initially incoming (or outgoing) phone calls didn’t work. Technician called support and discovered that the DVR needed to be configured first.
• The DVR seemed to not be working, so the technician swapped it out and also tried changing its connection to the gateway from twisted pair to coax. The actual problem may have been lack of patience. Turns out the DVR takes 4.5 minutes to start-up, and there is no signal to the TV for 3:20 of this startup.

Overall I was very pleased with the professionalism, courtesy, and respect from the installers, and the overall installation process.

Additional notes:

• At the end of the install, speedtest was showing 460 down 700 up. The tech said speed might improve over the next few days. When I was able to do more testing two days later I saw
speeds of 900 down and 886 up.

• If you are on a Mac, Safari seems to report speedtest download speeds about 200 Mbps less than Chrome.

• The 5268AC gateway supports a “guest” network. Devices on the “guest” network can’t access devices on the main network, nor do they have access to the gateway’s configuration page. I enabled the guest network, and configured my various IoT devices (light switches and internet radio) to be on the guest network to isolate them from the main network.

• The gateway’s status page (which does not require authentication to access)
includes the Wi-Fi passwords in plain text. To me, this appears to be a poor security decision.

• I noticed the gateway’s web interface sometimes being non-responsive, and messages being logged multiple times a minute about daemon radvd “attempting to reread config file” and “resuming normal operation”. So, I disabled LAN->IPv6 under settings.

• The gateway isn’t small. 10.41” x 6.97” x 2.56”

U-Verse TV:

Picture quality seems comparable to Comcast.

The WB affiliate is in HD on U-verse but only SD on Comcast.

The U-verse DVR experience is underwhelming. If this is your first DVR it is probably fine, but its features are just roughly equivalent to my 2007 TiVo HD, and significantly less than a current model TiVo Bolt. If Comcast’s customer retention had been willing to reduce my TV service bill below the U-verse price I would have kept it.

Details on DVR:
Services
No Netflix
No Amazon TV
No Hulu
No YouTube
No Vudu
Has U-verse On Demand (681 movies available for rental, 66 free movies, prime-time TV shows, no fast-forward)
DVR Features
No slow-mo playback
No frame advance from pause
No accelerated playback with audio
Can’t stream recorded shows to iPad
Can’t download recorded shows to iPad
DVR needs to be restarted whenever internet gateway loses power
Has multi-view
Has telephone caller ID notification

AT&T really should partner with TiVo to offer a modern DVR experience, for which I’d be willing to pay an additional monthly charge.

Links:

GPON Fundamentals (details of how data is distributed to you over fiber):
»sites.google.com/site/am ··· amentals

5268AC Gateway:
ARRIS Product page : »www.arris.com/products/5 ··· gateway/

IPH8010 DVR:
ARRIS Product Page: »www.arris.com/products/i ··· oom-dvr/

AT&T Fiber deployment locations thread: »Re: Gigapower [Fiber] - Mega List - Deployed/Being Deployed

Questions?
System

to bswift

Anon

to bswift
This topic has been closed. Reason: More suitable topic exists

See: »Gigapower [Fiber] - Mega List - Deployed/Being Deployed