I’ve now had a AT&T U-verse triple play install for around a week and a half, and so far I’m very happy.

Up to now in the Burden household we’ve had an AT&T conventional telephone line, Comcast cable broadband and DirecTV satellite. On paper the offer of consolidating to one service certainly made sense, I figure I’ll be saving around $1000 over 12 months going to U-verse, but would the service and offerings stack up?

The service has just been offered in my area as AT&T expand the network. Are you less than three miles from one of these VRADs (Video ready access devices?) If so, you’re in luck.

Firstly, I did not cancel my existing service and took advantage of the AT&T no-questions asked 30 day trial. I wanted to check the phone, internet and TV was working well, if not better, before cancelling other services – so I planned an overlap of service. AT&T also do a $200 cashback offer and free installation for certain packages.

We picked the full package, top tier TV, 24Mbps internet and digital telephone service.

I did my research before the install and read some horror stories, but I have to say the engineer and the install was great. Ordering the service online was easy, the porting of my home phone number to the digital service was painless (I did nothing) and tracking the progress of the order was simple.

Installation day

• 8am – automated web message to me saying that the engineer has been dispatched (hopefully that’s not in the mafia sense). I could even track his location online… I bet these engineers are thrilled about that…
• 8.50 – jolly installation engineer calls: telling me he’s doing something down the street at the VRAD, then he’ll be at the property shortly. Told me if I was using AT&T DSL or phone, the signal would drop out – which it did. I’m now cut off from the outside world!
• 9.15 – walked through my current house setup with the engineer so he could understand what services we currently have, how it is configured. Friendly and helpful guy gave options on the install. To minimise new holes etc, trying to leverage as much current house wiring as we can. I originally thought we’d have to rewire, but he is going to leverage existing cable in the house
• 10 – install well underway. The residential gateway will be in the garage and all the wiring will come from there – also a lead from the residential gateway will go straight into the phone line so we can still use our current phone jack in the kitchen – without putting the residential gateway inside the house
• 10.05 – three TV’s to be wired to U-verse (we only have one wired at the front of the house at present) – figuring out the best way to do this without wiring all over the house – again leveraging cable already in the house, some crawl space action required
• 10.40 – installation going strong. He’s moving pretty fast. The UPS and residential gateway is now getting switched on
• The rest of the day and install went fine with the install finishing just after lunch. Once finished, was walked through the setup and feature functionality

Residential gateway

The service is wired from the street to enter into your telephone box normally at the side of your house. I didn’t want the residential gateway (the main hub) or UPS in the house, and wanted in the garage. He ran a wire from the RG into the main phone box so we could use the existing phone sockets in the house. The install was very clean.

The RG is large and also has a UPS to power the RG for around six hours in the event of an emergency or power-cut. This is probably the only downfall of the system. If your RG fails – your TV, internet and home phone (after 6 hours) will die. However, I see this as a very small risk. If the power fails I would not be able to use the internet or TV anyway – and the landline would last for a while. I have my cell – and you can even program a ‘backup’ number for your landline should people not be able to get through the call is diverted.

This is the setup in my garage. To the left is the RG which has power supplied through the UPS, which in turn, plugs into the power. The RG runs the whole house – and wires come out of it to the TV’s (via existing cable) and to the telephone. I opted not to use AT&T’s wireless signal and switched it off. I run the house of my D-Link wireless N router (top right) to keep the N speeds as U-verse runs G. The white box on the bottom right is my NAS – which is the main storage for the house, my photo and video backup and streams movies via DNLA to my Playstation. All in all, a tidy setup.

The TV signal flows to three boxes in the house. One master box in the lounge with full functionality and the hard-disk for recording programs. The other two remote boxes stream content from the master and are all hard wired. The added advantage of these remote boxes is that they also carry the internet signal. There is a cat5 connector at the back of each – so in lounge the AT&T box connects by wire to my Playstation 3 and one of my other boxes connects via wire to my Apple TV. This gives a great signal to each instead of running them wirelessly.

Television

The television service is great. The UI is terrific and the speed of response when pressing a button is pretty much instant. DirecTV was terrible for button lag, and Comcast Cable a few years ago no better. This is clean, slick and looks nice. We now have true On-Demand and the selection is pretty good. The movies and programs stream instantly to the box. Couple the television service with the ability to access and set recordings via your iPhone, iPad and the web – it’s a very compelling offering. You can even watch selected programmes on your iPhone.

The technology is similar to any other DVR service to be honest, but the speed of the box and the UI helps a lot. As the box can take a lot of capacity you can record up to four channels at once and there are some cool features such as a news wall where you can watch all the news channels live in one place and select. Moving up and down the channels is good too as you can continue to watch your programme, but as you scroll through the menu you see live previews of all the stations.

Internet

Internet is internet is internet really. Not much to say. It’s a little slower (if you can call 22Mb/s slow) than my Comcast service, but I expected that. However, what I like so far is the service seems to be more consistent and reliable at all times of the day. Comcast offered speed boost – the first few meg download artificially fast, the rest of the download slower. Not this. The ping rate is a little slower (which can lead to problems with online gaming) but I’ve not had any issues playing on my PS3 games such as FIFA11. A speed test result is below:

Telephone

You use your conventional telephones with AT&T U-verse, they plug in the wall in the same way, but after that it’s very different. AT&T U-verse voice carries your calls over their internet network with VoIP. Everything works in the same way, but you get some very strong online features to manage your calls and voicemail. There’s also an iPhone and Blackberry app that lets you access your voicemail while out and about.

As I had my traditional phone service with AT&T before the install, the move was straight forward. My number was easily ported with no issues.

My concern with AT&T voice over IP is that I had a bad experience with Vonage last year. Calls would echo, or some sides of the conversation could not be heard. I’ve not experienced any issues yet. Calling internationally is fine too – good clarity – and the cost is lower than previous offerings – 7c/min to the UK (I think I paid 12c previously)

Here’s a screen grab from my iPhone:

Mobile/iPhone/iPad

And finally, the iPhone and iPad apps work really well if you want to schedule recordings on the move. The site for U-verse at Yahoo! is great too for searching and managing your recording.

All in all, I’m pretty pleased with the result of the install.