AT&T Fiber To The Home

I think once they realize the potential of fiber to the home, they will deploy it..

But till then, they (atat) will stick with their current offering.

I'm sure AT&T is fully aware of the potential of FTTH, but as mentioned, they aren't able to fully justify the cost at this time. I think the current UVerse offering will be great for a lot of customers and will only get better as AT&T deploys to more markets and works out some of the bugs.

maybe they are doing s steve jobs marketing tactic and make it REVOLUTIONARY every time. Like the iphone. New interface but come on no replaceable battery? anyways i see similarities.

Sadly AT&T is now locked-in to a "active fiber" network along with the active VRAD field nodes. They could've simply copied Verizon's passive optic network and saved a ton 'o money over the life of the system (as many here tried to tell them). But no, they saved a maybe 50% for now -- only to pay twice as much later to finish the job.

It wouldn't look so bad if Verizon hadn't already shown them way -- and thousands of others tried to tell 'em. AT&T has no excuse (hell the NSA probably would've paid half! ;0 )

Active fiber is pretty good stuff. Who doesn't like 10GBase-T over fiber?

AGREED ... thats what happens when you got old guys who pinch pennies running a company do.

When you run a company the investors are either behind you or not. Either way you tell them you guys wanted me here so I am making the smart decisions. If you don't like it invest your money in Quest stock which is going no where.

If you want long term profits and lower operating costs and less truck rollouts = less money more profit then build a store so you can sell your product.

You cant buy a piece of land and make parking spaces without building a walmart people dont' want a flee market they want a store they want a quality product without the hassle.

If Att is going to offer TV don't pussy foot around buy it and build it. And show the Cable co's this is what competition really is. Give them a run for the money.

People look at the prices in walmart and say oh yes more for less money i like the idea of that.

why is walmart so popular? hmm no brainer.

But there is the other people who want specific items and they go to the specialty store. (bussiness class)

Other than that Im not going to Target to get the same exact product and pay more just so i can say i went to tar'zjay.

I just love the idiology. Your shoe wears out get it resouled even if you only save half price as opposed to buying a new pair. Dont they know the upper part of the shoe will wear out soon? NO BRAINER.

their u-verse crap is crapand will only get worse

care to back that bold statement up?

i don't need to, all the reports show it you should pay attention

I won't go as far as to say it's crap, but it's extremely disappointing for me.

I currently record up to four HD channels at a time on my existing cable setup. I have 10/1 internet. This brand new freshly deployed system cannot deliver what I have now delivered on a network deployed 10 years ago? In its current state it is mighty crappy!

cable vs uverse cable more speed than uverse u verse is slower than cable

I would think it was also to keep impatient CUSTOMERS happy too. The longer it takes to roll out TV service in AT&T areas, the more customers will have turned permanently to other options. There are plenty of posts in the forums wanting AT&T to roll out VDSL NOW.

Naturally.

But, it's always better to bring out a working polished service LATE then rush a half-assed non-working (We'll patch it later) service into the market early.

So what if the Cable companies and DBS companies got to keep people TV services for 2 more years?

What's going to happen now is a lot of people will try the U-verse, and at&t will have to pay to hook them up, do installs, etc... only to have the customer dump the service two months later and demand credits on their bills for the problems.

That could cost them far more in the long run then simply waiting.

There's a saying that goes like this: "Seem's there's never time to do it right the first time--- but there's always time to do it over."

The customers are only satisfied with the faster rollout IF when they get the service it works as promised.

So far i like the service it just needs to work out some bugs. They are adding hd channels all the time. Right now with all the deals they have it is hard to pass up. They are doing weekly updates so there is constant improvements. They are listening to the customer and sending our requests upstream to management. It is my understanding we will be getting another hd stream and a couple more sd streams as well as remote dvr playing capabilities through the normal non dvr box(pretty cool). I am just learning the systems so i need to work out my kinks too.

They do need to work on dvr recording timing, web remote data past a week(like when setting series up). Some UI tweaks need to be done but the interface is a bit faster than directtv's dvrs (which is what made me shy away from DirectTV).

I plan on making a list of improvements to the system and send them in and see how much gets done. I will stick it out for a little while but i keep comparing it to direct tv's dvr. i will say the Microsoft methodology is in place with this dvr.

We should be expecting 10 mbps soon for the internet also. Multi room dvr, and more streams coming very soon. And many more hd streams are added each month.

Sounds nice. If only AT&T deemed my part of CT "fit for deployment." We've been ignored here since the days of SNET, then SBC, and now AT&T. When pretty much the entire rest of the state of Connecticut can get U-Verse, we still can't. Gee, wasn't that part of the "state-wide video franchise agreement?" That EVERYBODY in the state is supposed to be able to get the service? Gee, it appears AT&T isn't living up to their end of the deal? WHAT A SURPRISE!!

have you written to ATT? Try contacting them in a kind and professional way. Try to convince them in a way they understand. Get a petition of likely customers have them sign it and send it to the appropriate person. This way they HAVE some financial incentive already.

I think that any service will have disappointments. (I've never found one that didn't.) I've had UVERSE for 8 months now and I have had a significantly better experience than with satellite providers. My experience is that the freezing of picture (HD and non-HD) seems to be caused by their choice if HPNA for home networking. The boxes connected to the gateway with cat-5 ethernet never freeze. Those over HPNA do.

So what I'm trying to say is this article can mis-lead you into believing the service deployed as is cannot work well; but it can and does for many people.

Here's an external link about some up and coming improvements. I'm especially looking forward to the ability to watch material recorded to the DVR on any TV or Computer in the home!

»www.dallasnews.com/share ··· b91.html

I had a pure CAT-5 install.

Well, like I said, it won't always work for everyone. Unfortunately! Different areas, different line quality. And as this article points out, FTTH would probably improve reliability so that everybody has more consistent experiences.

If you're using cat5 to transport the data in the house, you have FTTP, and rebooting the box fixes the problem, it isn't an issue of signal strength or interference, it's an issue of buggy software or buggy drivers for the hardware.

AT&T U-Verse is okay for today, but it will not be good enough in a couple of years. VDSL does not have the bandwidth needed for future growth. AT&T says they will just change their strategy to FTTH, but I don't think it's that easy. FTTH requires different equipment than FTTN. So by the time U-Verse is fully deployed using VDSL it will be obsolete.

I thought ATT was doing FTTH for all new developments and retrofitting all old areas to FTTN.

If you build a new house it should be FTTH.

nope! only areas they call "greenfield" are fiber to the house. which is very limited. I live near several brand new condo developments they don't have any services from AT&T except phone everything else they have to use either DirecTV or DishNetwork or TWC. AT&T won't even spend a dime to get their business and i'm talking major homes in the $500,000 plus range and roughly 80+ homes in each development. they're all very close together too in terms of lay out on the street so its not like itd cost them a huge amount of money to do anything really its jut getting them to put the network in. But if they don't someone else will.

LOL have to laugh. I live in an area where every home is 500K -2.6 Million which is several thousand homes but AT&T still won't/can't deliver anything but antiquated POTs telephone and "High Speed DSL" of hold on to your hats folks 1500/256. AT&T will milk these areas of their infrastructure to squeeze every last penny before doing any work to upgrade. Comcrap the local Cable monopoly holder doesn't deliver either. They have a captive audience, so to speak, so they can pretty much ignore the reality that 1500mbits/sec isn't high speed intenet connectivity in todays world.

bwahaha bwahaha bwahaha

Do a side by side comparsion with Comcast's digital service and Uverse, you'll see the difference.

can you elaborate? Your post is worthless as is.

I was not expecting my experience to hit the front page. I've been tagged as an "AT&T hater" around here on a few occasions. I want to add that this is not the case. I've been critical of every company's shortcomings that I've had service from. All services have their advantages and disadvantages, for certain. U-Verse was no different. There were some things I liked better than Dish, such as the SD picture quality. However, between my wife and I, there were too many things we did NOT like. Either way, I had to give it a shot.
My install experience was pretty horrible. This was no problem from the Techs, rather problems in the NOC. Apparently I was the first FTTP UVERSE install in Oklahoma, and it wasn't even all set up in the NOC when the installers showed up. This is why it took 2 days for them to get me running. The technicians that came out were, however, top notch and did a great job with the resources they were provided. I did find it a little disturbing that the techs have to go up the chain of command just like the customers, though. They call into tier 1, then get passed to tier 2, etc etc.
I thought that going from 12/1 (Cox) to 6/1 (U-VERSE) would not be a big problem. However, the page loads were slower, latency was higher, and download speeds were so much slower that it really did cause an adverse change in my usage. I didn't think I'd ever miss 12mbps, but as it turns out, I did.

My suggestions to AT&T to make this a successful product:

-Put an OTA tuner in future STB's. There is NO reason not to have this. It's an easy way for them to add an extra HD stream. I wonder if they're afraid of people seeing how much better OTA looks?
-Improve the HD quality. With the streams being compressed down to 6mbps, something has to change. There is way too much compression on the streams, especially in scenes heavy in blacks. It's painfully obvious.
-Whole home DVR. I know this is in the works...it can't come soon enough.
-15/2 or better internet speeds. I mean, this is becoming fairly commonplace from Cable. AT&T needs to compete on more than just PRICE.
-Fix "quick skip" to jump in 30 second increments, not to "scan" in 7 second increments.

There's a lot more that I'm forgetting, I'm certain. I'll add to this later.

EDIT: one more thing to add. In terms of DVR interface and usability, UVERSE DESTROYS Cox Cable. I mean, obliterates them. The Scientific Atlanta boxes with the HORRIBLE 1980's era software on Cox's STB's disqualifies them from usage in my house. I DO feel like U-Verse would be an upgrade to someone using Cable. However, I feel like they have a ways to go to catch up to satellite.

One last note. I wish I could have given them a chance to fix things. However, my family was NOT happy with the changes, and I had them breathing down my neck to "bring back Dish." Luckily, I never canceled it. Once they've done a lot more FTTP installs in OKC, and they bring on the changes (faster speeds, more HD streams, etc) I will definitely give them another shot.

the quick skip on mine actually does 30 seconds on mine. I agree the install guys were very good and knowledgeable. They answered all my questions and i asked a lot of technical ones. it seems the sales guys, UVERSE tech support, and installers know the product well. very nice.

They dont include a tuner because it makes the STBs more expensive. This is one of the reasons they are providing 3 boxes as part of the deal.

Hate to tell you this, but along the lines cwh's post of the OTA tuner costing more money, DirecTV is also NOT putting OTA tuners in their 2 latest HD boxes - neither the HD DVR (HR21) or the HD non-DVR box (H21) have them anymore. Unless you happen to live in an HD LIL market, you ain't going to be getting your locals in HD with these boxes.
Luckily, I was able to get 2 new HR20's w/the OTA tuners before they disappeared for the most part.You also forgot to add that ONE HD stream for an entire household is NOT going to cut it for long - hell, you can't even record & watch 2 different HD streams now!

The HR-21 is a rack mount serial controllable receiver. It's targeted at the home automation, fully integrated system crowd who wouldn't be attaching the OTA to the satellite box anyway. For the market it's targeted at OTA support on the HR-21 would be a complete waste as they are going to have a system that controls the signals and processing and don't need the set-top box to do it. The current consumer oriented DVR has OTA and always will. I don't know much about the H-21, but I wager it's probably the same deal, a box targeted at the high end fully integrated system crowd. DirecTV isn't going to ditch OTA tuners on the consumer versions, it would be suicide as not all markets have available locals, nor will they ever. Not only that but they probably have a significant portion of their subscriber base in areas where locals aren't available on the satellite and won't ever be available (simply because of the number of localities).

Don't think because they droped the OTA on a product targeted at a very specific high end installation that it means they are dropping the support on all their receivers.

Sorry, but you're confused with the HR21 PRO, which is as you say it is:
»technabob.com/blog/2007/ ··· -leaked/

The HR21, which other than being black, looks EXACTLY like the HR20, sans OTA antenna input & IS being installed in lieu of HR20's. It is just like any other of the "consumer grade" receivers D* routinely installs - NO rack mounts. I KNOW this for a fact, since I was shipped one incorrectly, as well as I have several D* HD clients that were given HR21's, instead of the HR20's they asked for. Walk into your local Best Buy & you'll see plenty of HR21's & H21 receivers sitting on the shelves.

Go over to satguys.us & you can see the D* folks bitching about their "upgraded" receivers.

»www.satelliteguys.us/dir ··· r21.html

Software is software just to foloow your comments on the Sa boxes or any boxes. When in timw they load a new one uverse, Cox, whomever I am sure it will accomadte what they are using or plan to use at the time.

Tell you this a digital picture is a digital picture as a Hd pic is a Hd pic. How it is delivered is the only difference.

now for companies that are public and as Big as ATT, they have to do what is best and right for them to keep their stock holders happy(money in their pockets)

Why do you think Cox was the most recent to fo Private. Companies want to do what is best for the company not what everyone esle wants them to do.

I've been waiting for a few reasons to switch (once my DirecTv contract is up) to Uverse... so far I'm still waiting.

I wouldn't mind trying out the service, however, I don't think I'd like to lose a few days of outage to have the service installed.

Upside:
Bundling is cheaper than current situation (assuming I go VoIP).
Increased speed (I'm on a 3008/512kbps DSL @ 12,000' - AT&T won't let me sign up for anything other than 1538/384kbps now )

Downside:
Increased latency (10ms isn't horrible to increase).
Can't order internet + VoIP + cell service as a product... any 'Uverse' service comes with TV. I currently have no issues with DTV.

I have to pretty much decide between cable (voip+hsi+digital tv), Uverse (HSI+digital tv) + POTS or DSL + POTS + DirecTv.

Issues:
I'm still waiting on Uverse to deploy VoIP.
Extra HD streams
I'm hoping that AT&T will increase bandwidth and latency (20ms 1st hop is pretty poor)
AT&T becoming big brother on multiple fronts.

They need to up the available bandwidth in a hurry. If Mediacom wasn't the cable provider in my area I would have cable internet and voip.

Satellite is the best choice for tv.

yup U-verse is a joke Mediacom is upping us to 20/2 now
ATT cant even TOUCH THAT and Mediacom's HD is much better then ATT so much fail

Well.... Mediacom won't spend the cash to build out the market here in Mobile, Al to cover new developments. Unfortunately for me I am in one of those areas, so that's why I said what I did about Mediacom.

A company like AT&T using an excuse like "consistent user experience" to justify their half assed upgrade is pretty comical. How many millions of dollars has this company spent on repainting new names on vans and buildings in the past 7 years?

They'll have gone through at least 4 more mergers or spin-offs by the time Uverse is anywhere close to finished, and will still end up with a hodgepodge system that isn't good for much.

You know I have to agree with your point on that one. It cost much money to do a merger. And the money they are spending on commercials and research and trying to make IPTV work on VDSL is crazy.

Note this: The money alone they pay to the last CEO or company officers was crazy BBR noted how much money these guys are getting in bonuses and options. Its insane.

All money that could have been used to further develop and deploy fiber to the home.

Think about it a company as large as ATT is now (SBC) if they were to purchase millions of miles of fiber the cost would go down especially since verizon is buying a butt load of it they could even make a deal with verizon (purchase power) to make the price to the winning bidder (fiber maker) to get the best price due to volume buying. Like the Walmart effect.

China sells cheap fiber and there fiber works.

It would have been smarter to wait till verizon blows some cash and makes mistakes and ATT could learn from them and as we speak the cost of fiber is going down in price as demand rises.

And then why not utilize the mistakes verizon made rolling out FTTH and save themselves the money by doing it right.. and in the end investors happy and customers as well as customers.

And ATT would be in the front of the pack and ready for any type of situation that comes there way and they can blow cable away with fiber to the home.

Give 4 HD streams to each home and 20/20 interenet w/telephone bundle is a synch with FTTH.

Of course.

Fiber is cheap regardless, it's the labor and equipment to do boring and installation that costs big money.

I own a small cable company in Indiana (300 subs) along with a telephone and Internet company. I have IPTV via FTTH and ADSL2+ experience in a former life. I paid a consultant a lot of money to come in and help me make some service plans and one of the partners made a point to me that has really stuck.

If you know anything about old world telephony and the days of Belcore and Bell labs you know that the traditional telephone companies know how to do voice. It has been perfected, if you will, from years of experience and R&D.

Well, cable has done the same thing with video.

I believe that unless the big cable companies begin to use IP technology to deliver video for their main feeds, IPTV will never be more than glimmer of hope to succeed. RF, QAM, and any other video delivery system has been perfected by the big cable co's. They combined forces and employed Motorola, Scientific Atlanta, and other vendors to produce a product that works for all of them, not dissimilar to what the telcos did in the early years.

They know that IPTV is the future, but they also know that this may be the only way the telco's can compete with them on a large scale (Verizon is using cable co technology), thus they are in no hurry to perfect the product. If the telco's ever want this to work they should consider joining forces on at least an old Belcore mentality.

Otherwise it will be a long, arduous and expensive journey for all of us.

Make no mistake about the press release; AT&T's move is only a tactical decision based upon optimistic view of getting cable-tv customers away from the competition, nothing more. There is NO intention to create a FTTP network as robust as the one built by big red (Verizon) or any municipality. One can't be surprised that once the bills started coming in for some builds, that AT&T was humping themselves with ATM & VDSL telco equipment vendors. When orders start rolling in for docis 3, and cable-cos start running HDTV 100+ channels, AT&T would be left in the dust. Comcast will protect itself in it's core subscriber base as necessary that's more than a sure bet. Anything less than full gpon FTTP would not compete.

Fiber to the home for the Same old Service! HAHA! Future proofed, yes. But who wants fiber for sub-fiber performance! I bet they will charge more too. They are most likely using the additional bandwidth to siphon your data straight to the NSA! It might be cheaper to hire a NSA agent in a box to sit outside peoples homes and monitor their every move and bit transfered!

I'm currently staying at a friends house over the holidays who has cox cable standard tier in the Cox San Diego California market. This tier is 7Mbit/sec downstream and 512kbps upstream.
The best AT&T DSL is 6Mbps download and 768kbps upload.
Uverse only advantage is the extra 256k of upstream, and that's it? Come on AT&T give your users better internet, we don't all want TV!

i wonder if how the speeds and prices compare to the speed and prices of cable internet access in U-verse deployed areas. all hail duopolies?

i could see wanting a uniform experience when there is very very few FTTH customers, but they must be smoking something strong if they really think it is a 'good' idea to keep up that practice for long (increased FTTH deployment). looking at the U-verse situation from just as a lowly consumer with knowledge, it seems like there is a lot of untapped potential in the U-verse network.

i don't really care if they first do FTTN then FTTH as long as speeds and pings improve, along with quality of service. some people hate the idea, but to me, it seems like getting a town wired up (and 'live') for FTTN happens faster and cheaper than FTTH, which the 1/3 of Verizon's 23 million number seems to back up. it is sort hard to compare Verizon's number to ATT's numbers because there maybe different equipment used, but more importantly is how aggressive the deployment is.

They just upgraded my area to Uverse, and two of my next door neighbors have it. One has been very complimentary about it, but he has very little tech experience. I haven't talked to the other, but I had considered ordering it and trying it out. I'd suffer a reduction to 6 down from 7 (Time Warner) for a $10/mo price drop. But I've been told by one of their reps, that I either get the WHOLE package (including video) or nothing. I want naked internet, not video, not phone... just internet- but according to their rep (who referred to it as "cable") I can't get the bare line. How stupid is that?!?

I have read every comment in this thread so far. I am not a techno-geek in fiber to the house for FTTP or FTTH, though I know my ABC's.

I have had everything from 300baud internet through CompuServe to 56k dial-up with TIR, then Mindspring / Earthlink, then xDSL with Earthlink that failed and they removed it to Comcast Internet/Cable to SBC-Global xDSL/Direct TV. Overall, Direct-TV had the most straight-forward menuing system of all of them. Nice feature with Comcast, pre-schedule a show and the TV when on with a warning that it was going to change to the prescheduled channel. If you had your VCR or DVDRW hooked up, all the better. U-verse menuing doesn't compare to Direct-TV. My experience with D-TV was a better picture, very little digitalizing, 2 or 3 freeze-ups over the entire contract and one (1) picture loss due to whether in Michigan...yes MI. That has all happened tens of times with U-verse since my June 4 '07 install. What does ATT U-verse need to do to create an enhanced user interace:

•Don't just scroll a menu up and down, let it wrap so you are not pushing an up and down arrow and waiting for it to do something, unless you know count the options in advance.
•Clean up the picture. I don't have HDTV, so I am not asking for much. Even with little updates I have noticed along the way, I still get some digitalizing or jerky motions. Other times the picture is suburb, so I know they can do it if they want.
•Telco, hands off the pairs at the pole!
•DVR...ha, I laugh at it. Record shows, especially during the holiday and try to watch another one. Okay, everyone, go your room and turn off the box, we wouldn't want to blow out the gateway or anything.
•DVR does not know how to tell time. I think we learned that in preschool!
•The Guide doesn't give you correct programming on what could be called nationwide cable channels. I don't bother much with local channels so I don't know about them. "Getting Info, Getting Info, Getting Info, Getting Info."
•Music...what music. Oh that choppy stuff is part of the rhythm, ya, its the Urge of the music to play to the beat. I guess it keeps the cost down, but how does cable and D-TV use the Music Channels or Siris to bring us "quality" music and quality "choice."
•Internet. 6/1, please. If you can the ATT HSI speed test site to work at all with out crashing all the Tabs in IE 7, good luck. So test with DSLR and tcpIQ. Then post your result! I challenge anyone to get similar download speeds. Over all, upload speeds are fairly closely match as advertised...download, ha, again I laugh.

So, whether fiber to the house, FTTP, FTTH, LMNOP, does it really matter with a product that is not yet mature. No doubt financially yes in the long run, but by the time they finish this go-round of installs, new technology will be knocking on our doors. I say pick what works best for you know and just enjoy it because in a couple of years all of this will seem like 300baud and 56k...maybe???

See my profile review of UVerse for the gory details, but suffice to say that the UVerse DVR was what drove me back to my prior setup: DirecTV Tivo. I don't have an HDTV and only use one SD TV so I couldn't test some of the more bandwidth intensive TV features but that DVR software was so horrid that I just couldn't stand it. My coworkers tell me I'm just too spoiled for Tivo - probably true.

I actually recorded a small session of my main complaints along with the same situations on the Tivo for comparison that I'll try to post when I get the time to edit it.

On the internet side, the 3/1 DSL is rock solid (unlike the Earthlink crap I came from) and AT&T is letting me keep the UVerse VDSL connection rather than making switch back to standard ADSL so I feel like I've got the best of both worlds. (Although I wish they'd sell me a package that could tap into the 28/2 speed that the modem is getting!)

I also have give them kudos for customer service (something EarthLink also is sorely lacking) as they had no silly contracts and didn't haggle with me when I cancelled the TV service. In fact, the whole experiment of do UVerse cost me about $0 after the free 1st month and $100 rebate check.

That is the day that "Hopefully" my nightmare with Comcast will be over. For over 4 years I've waited for the day that I can have DSL because I was 2,000 feet too far north. But then again another 4 blocks north from my house was another city in which DSL was available. I was caught in between coverages in a black hole.

Good reasons for U,verse:
#1. I only have 1 HDTV in my house so only 1 HD signal is ok with me. With the cheapest package I get 50 HD channels. Currently with Comcast I have the cheapest TV package, just connect the coaxial cable into the back of my TV. I have about 8 to 12 cable channels other than local air, and all analog. I get a free upgrade to Silver tier with a cable TV subscription. I already have Direct TV and rarely watch the channels from Comcast.
#2. VDSL isnt shared amongst the neighbors and 6mbps is just fine. I won't be affected by the illegal uncapped modems that my neighbors have. While my neighbors are online consuming bandwidth my download rate is under 2mbps. I'm an online gamer and VDSL is more steady. My VOIP phone with Vonage will be cleared with better quality. Perhaps I will get a discount if I sign up for AT&T VOIP if it's available.
#3. I was told they will reuse the cable that is going to my house. For over 7 months I've been having latency issues and had my whole line redone. I have 2 drops to my house. 1 is a designated line for my internet and the other is the pre-existing line.