[COLUG] AT&T and other Internet/TV providers

[Brian McDonald]

On Saturday 05 July 2008 3:24 pm, richard hornsby wrote:
> I don't know much about the U-verse stuff specifically, but my
> experience TW vs WoW is that WoW is much more responsive to the (CATV
> or ISP) few issues and problems that came up than TW ever was.  It
> just always felt like I was getting more for my dollar with WoW, and
> was treated (generally) to my level of expertise.  I moved to an area
> not serviced by WoW, so I'm back to TW.

Ditto . WOW has always been good to me in terms of service, even after I 
called em up and asked them about cable cards.  My twin s-cards are the same 
price as a single set-top box, which seems like a very reasonable deal to me.

To boot - they also both work, which is more than I hear from other folks 
trying the cablecard route.

> I haven't switched to AT&T for TV mostly because when asking about
> using my $600 S3 TiVo with their service, 70% of the answers are
> "negative, use our DVR", 20% of the answers are "TiVo?  Cablecard?"
> and 10% are "Oh sure your TiVo will work fine".  My understanding is
> that AT&T doesn't have to support cablecards because technically
> they're not a cable provider, they're more of an IPTV service.  I have

That's a lovely technicallity.  Ars Technica has a few good articles about how 
AT&T has wailed and moaned about not being a cable TV provider so they can 
avoid having to get franchise rights from localities before using the public 
right-of-ways for the UVerse boxes.  Those boxes which have, on at least two 
occassions, exploded
.
http://arstechnica.com/search.ars?search=u-verse&path=%2F&author=&sort=&page=1

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070306-telecoms-get-a-break-with-new-fcc-franchise-rules.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070727-federal-judge-att-u-verse-cable-tv.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071004-u-verse-coming-to-illinois-in-2008.html
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080423-comcast-atts-u-verse-is-messing-with-our-network.html

When the courts kept supporting the local city groups and against AT&T not 
being a cable TV service, AT&T lobbied the hell out of the FCC and to try to 
get a federal get-out-of-doing-the-right-thing card.  Overall, it's been a 
lot of dirty pool.

> their DSL service to try it out, but I need to do some inside wiring
> work to the phone line before I can make a good comparison.

Yeah - in the end, it's just regular copper networking.  They run fiber to 
your neighborhood (in a giant box) then copper to your house, and set you up 
with data, digital phone and IPTV.  The IPTV has some bandwidth limits (you 
can only watch one HD channel at a time, for instance) and you're required to 
have an IPTV box on each TV where you want to watch shows, because they all 
need an IPTV tuner.  The network access point gives you ethernet.  So in the 
end, it looks just like everybody elses cable offerings - a modem and a bunch 
of set top boxes, which, since they're "not a cable tv provider" you can't 
not have.

That and it's AT&T.  "Sir, we don't have to care.  We're the phone company!"

Apologies to everyone here who works for AT&T.  I'm sure it's not your fault, 
but really - the service is being really overhyped for what it is, and the 
company is taking a really nice anti-local-government swing at things to get 
it done, which makes my 10th amendment cry.

Brian