I’m sure you can find people who love the service and I’m happy for them.. but for the people who are having issues this is the place to voice your experience and see who else is suffering from similar issues.

I’m in the IT field.. have been for Twenty-five years. I work with Network engineers, Programmers, Quality Assurance, and customer service. I know a good product and I know when a product is not ready to go live. AT&T Uverse is not ready to go live in all areas.

There is also an additional issue that I would like to address

Roldan: In your response to my fellow prem tech you mentioned that, “Facts are facts.” However, your facts are incorrect. I am completely aware that our amount of customers compared to other major television providers is insignificant but you need to consider that U-verse is a new product. Also in your condemnation of my comrade you stated, “The actual count as of April 22, 2009 is 1.3 million and dropping.” I know that I am only a lowly cable installer and that your intelligence far exceeds mine, however, your statement is incorrect. I am currently enrolled in business school and I just wrote a paper on the rapid growth of At&t U-verse and unlike you I have the “facts.”

The statements below are from At&t’s quartery reports. I’ve also included the links that my research is based on. In order to maintain my 3.90 gpa my instructors require that my research is based on fact and not opinion, apparently you were never taught that principal.

First Quarter 2009:

Strong growth in AT&T U-verseSM TV subscribers, with a net increase of 284,000, nearly double the company’s gain in the year-earlier first quarter, to reach 1.3 million in service

http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=26752

Second Quarter 2009:

Continued strong growth in AT&T U-verseSM TV subscribers, with a net increase of 248,000, to reach 1.6 million in service; more than three-fourths of AT&T U-verse TV subscribers have a triple- or quad-play option from AT&T

http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=26961

Third Quarter 2009:

240,000 net gain in AT&T U-verseSM TV subscribers — up from 232,000 added in the year-earlier third quarter — to reach 1.8 million in service, with continued high broadband and voice attach rates

http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=27290

As you can see the rapid growth of U-verse continues on regardless of the problems listed throughout this blog. Anyone who thinks that at&t actually cares when you cancel your service is sadly mistaken. I think it’s funny when someone cancels all of their services with at&t because of their problems with U-verse. Don’t you realize that you are only hurting yourself, because now, you no longer have the opportunity to own outsanding products like the iPhone because you want to make a point that no one will hear.

The only reason there are less U-verse customers than Comcast or Timer Warners customers is because of it’s limited availability.

Roldan you also stated, “Good product plus Good Customer Service equals happy customers.”

At&t is 8th on Fortune magazines list of most profitable companies in 2008. Your complaints have gone nowhere and cost them nothing. If At&t isn’t providing a good product or good customer service than how come they are the most profitable telecommunications company on the planet.

See the full list of America’s largest corporations, including detailed company profiles and contact information. Plus, post your thoughts on the winners. more
1. Exxon Mobil 6. General Motors
2. Wal-Mart Stores 7. Ford Motor
3. Chevron 8. AT&T
4. ConocoPhillips 9. Hewlett-Packard
5. General Electric 10. Valero Energy

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2009/

On a daily basis I deal with customers who yell at me for everything and anything that at&t has done to upset them. If my post sounds harsh or insensative……..oh well, deal with it just like I do. I think it’s ridiculous that people log on this site to complain about how their installers had dreds, tatoos or missing teeth. Perhaps your installer is having issues communicating because hes nervous around you, not because he is stupid. Most of my fellow technicians work hard and do their best to provide you with quality service. Just because you don’t understand why they did something the way they did, doesn’t mean it was wrong.

I look foward to your responses…….(Roldan)

He explained a little about the service. As one of the other posters has said, I was under the impression that U-Verse was fiber-to-the-door. The tech explained that it was really only fiber-to-the-box-somewhere-in-the-vicinity-of-my-house.

My antennae went up on that, having been burned a few years back with ATT’s highly marketed failure, “Wireless Internet” (we won’t go into that. other than to point out that the experience tended to color my attitude toward ATT).

After driving off to find the neighborhood box and do some settings on my line, the tech came back and began to run some tests on our line at the house. After an hour or so, he advised me that the quality of the signal as it entered our house was marginal or substandard. He offered to check back up the line and see if they could do something about the signal strength/quality issue. I told him it didn’t hurt to try.

After another hour or so, no response from up the line. By this time I was pretty nervous about the whole deal. I told the tech that I was going to pull the plug on this caper, given that my household cable runs are several years old, the idea of jury-rigging something to try and enhance the signal was, to me, likely doomed to failure, and, given the size of my order, there was no way he could get it completed before midnight or later.

Then the fun began. Called the tech support line and told the robot I wanted to cancel a U-Verse order. Got a level 1 (I assume) person who was obviously very young and suffering from that malady so common with her age group whereby they feel they absolutely have to compress their sentences and paragraphs into the shortest possible slice of time, blurting them out in a sonic vomitus that defied comprehension by the listener. After I coaxed her to slow down and explained why I wanted to cancel, the inevitable handoff began, whereby I was treated to a cheesy Muzak serenade lasting the 4 minutes it took to get to the next level. When I explained (again) my purpose to this next level person, the lady allowed as how they were unable to handle that in her department but would be happy to transfer me to the department that could, and, by the way, I should expect a call with a phone survey on my level of satisfaction with the service she gave me. I pointed out to her that the “service” amounted to a phone transfer – which had not yet been consummated – and I did not, at that instant, have a basis upon which to make any evaluation. The irony of this seemed to escape her.

More cheesy Muzak, and then a nice fellow comes on the line. I had reached the “cancellation” department. Actually – and I should have known this – the department was really the “save this order” department, in which the reps were authorized to offer me additional discounts if I would but forget this silly cancellation business. The reps were not, however, authorized to actually do any installation-day cancellations. But all was not lost, they were authorized to call another department (apparently located in that same nether region where Dick Cheney used to hole up) and argue my cancellation case with the poobahs therein (all the while letting me enjoy the cheesy Muzak) and providing me with periodic updates, most of which were something like “I am still trying to get them”.

After a long while and several “Still waiting for …” updates, the nice fellow came back and told me he had been successful in cancelling my order (but, of course, there was no confirmation number or something similar). I asked the next obvious question: what about my current phone lines and DSL (also with ATT)? How could he assure me that these would not be cut off? More Muzak, after which he came back and told me he had cancelled the phone number port orders and had checked with the DSL disconnectors to be sure they would not cut my DSL.

So, here I sit, hoping against hope that he was right, they would not cut off my phone service nor cut off my DSL serv

From: David Plotz
Subject: What 15 Barbecue Meals in a Row Did to My Digestion
Posted Friday, May 27, 2005, at 7:30 AM ET

Today’s slide show: What 15 Barbecue Meals in a Row Did to My Digestion
AUSTIN and LLANO, Texas—Here’s the amazing thing about Texas barbecue. Even a run-of-the-mill place around here is better than the best barbecue anywhere else. On Monday night in Austin, my father and I ate our third barbecue meal of the day at the Iron Works, a downtown joint with a modest reputation. It was great!
There was a bit too much forced funkiness in Austin for my taste. We spent the night in the funky Austin Motel (“So Close Yet So Far Out,” read the sign), ate dessert at the funky ice cream shop across the street, read the paper the next morning in the funky coffee shop next door (but we didn’t get a funky tattoo at the funky tattoo parlor). After a tour of the fantastic Museum of Texas—where there was a lot of talk of longhorns, but none of barbecue—we headed west through the Hill Country to hunt for lunch. The barbecue in the Hill Country west of Austin is slightly different than in towns east of Austin such as Lockhart. Some Texans claim that West Texas—and thus the whole American West—starts in the Hill Country. The barbecue west of Austin has a slightly more cowboy feel. (It’s cooked over mesquite rather than post oak, for example.)
In the Hill Country, the bluebonnets and other wildflowers were in bloom, and the sun finally decided to come out. It was a perfect day for driving. We cruised 100 miles through ranches and scrub land to the small town of Llano. We pulled up at Cooper’s Old Time Pit Bar-B-Q, a place recommended by several of my barbecue rabbis. I realized, as we stepped out of the car, that Cooper’s was where I first tasted Texas barbecue on my road trip 16 years ago. I was so glad to return.
At Cooper’s, you step right up to the outdoor pit and point at the meat you want. The pitmaster grabs it; slices off as much as you ask for; slaps it on a tray; pours a tiny bit of thin, vinegary sauce on it; and hands it to you. Then you take it inside and hand it to a cashier, who weighs it and dumps it on butcher paper—your plate. We ordered ribs, brisket, and two kinds of sausage, then returned for seconds of brisket and prime rib. Customers sit family-style inside, helping themselves from the buckets of jalapeños and loaves of Butterkrust bread on the tables. The place is less charming than Smitty’s—the walls are cinderblock and ceilings are low—but it’s friendly. The barbecue was superb. The brisket was stellar, and the ribs may be the best I’ve tasted. (It’s criminal that Memphis is recognized as the city of great ribs, because every rib I ate in Texas was vastly superior.) We also ate a mesmerizingly delicious blackberry cobbler. It was the first dessert I ate at a barbecue restaurant on the whole trip, and it made me wonder what I missed elsewhere.
On our way out, we discovered that my father and President Bush, who don’t agree about very much, agree about Cooper’s ribs. A testimonial letter from Bush to the ribs hangs on the wall. He ate here when he was governor, and during the vote-counting after the 2000 election, Cooper’s catered a picnic at Bush’s Crawford ranch.
We made our way back to Austin, sated. I had driven 1,800 miles in seven days, eaten 15 barbecue meals in a row, and finally found bliss in Texas. The four Texas barbecue meals I ate in 24 hours were better than any other barbecue I ever had in my life (save my one meal at Cooper’s in 1989). I had found my barbecue bliss, and I was done. My lower intestine had ground to a complete stop, and I had a slight pain in my chest. It was time to go home.
At the Austin airport, I was singled out for a special security screening. The TSA agent fingering through my bag pulled out a jar of barbecue sauce I had bought at Gates in Kansas City. “What’s this?” she asked.
“It’s barbecue sauce,” I said.
“I know it’s barbecue sauce. I mean, what kind of sauce is it? I’ve never seen this kind before.”
“It’s from Kansas City.”
She grimaced at this. Holding the jar like it contained C-4 explosive, she showed it to another screener. “Look, this guy has some kind of barbecue sauce from New York City or something,” she told the other screener derisively.
“Kansas City,” I weakly interrupted.
She waved me off, then said in an ominous voice. “Now, why would you have that?”
“I was on a barbecue tour,” I answered. “I started in Kansas City, and finished here.”
“Did you go to Rudy’s?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“You came to Texas for barbecue, and you didn’t go to Rudy’s?” She turned to her partner. “He came to Texas, and he didn’t go to Rudy’s!” The partner shook his head.
“What about the Salt Lick?” she asked. I shook my head no again. She made a face.
The partner continued the interrogation. “How about the County Line?”
I shook my head.
“Well, where did you go?” the screener asked in an exasperated voice.
“I went to Cooper’s in Llano. And I went to Smitty’s and Kreuz Market in Lockhart.”
She lit up. “Well, why didn’t you say that to begin with?” She nudged her partner. “He went to Lockhart.” The partner nodded. The agent turned back to me, and handed me the bag and the sauce. “You can go ahead now.”
David Plotz is Slate’s deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at dplotz@slate.com.

The Uverse service has improved a lot. We have 5 boxes with 2 HD tvs and we have had no problems since the summer… fingers crossed. It did take them about a year to work out the kinks.

1) The quality of the technician who installs your service
2) The quality of the existing AT&T wire infrastructure in your neighborhood, and
3) The distance from your house to AT&T’s local connection box.
4) Whether or not you ever have to call AT&T about any service, billing, order, issue etc.

I think the general consensus is that having to contact AT&T for anything (service, billing, order issues) is a kiss of death. They’re dying under the weight of their own bureaucratic infrastructure.

In our case, the install rep was great, and we’re close to the local switching point. Our service quality has been great, and we like it! (We had switched from Comcast, which we also liked, due to price.) Basically, we lucked out.

I think the basic problem AT&T has is that it is almost impossible for them to deliver a product with a consistent quality — there are simply too many variables (i.e., state of the wiring, distance to the neighborhood switching point, etc.) I think they’ve been very aggressive about hiring install technicians to support their growth, so I think they’re having problems on the personnel end as well.