AT&T Uverse installed

[LCHIEN]

The installers from AT&T finally came today and installed my "stuff" I'm supposed to have for 2 months free trial.

They disconnected my DSL on the phone pair and connected the Uverse on the second pair. I guess the first pair only carries POTs now.

At the NIC, the put a balun so that the twisted pair could drive the 75 ohm coax distribution in the house.

Connected that the the point where Comcast used to enter the house.

Replaced all the splitters in the attic.

Installed a gateway box on the second floor. I used to have the DSL modem/wireless router in the study downstairs but there is no coax outlet there. The gateway has the cable modem and wireless router.

Then I got three receivers, one with DVR. They went by the TVs.
One of them has to be hooked to the gateway via ether net cable.

They were willing to set the SSID and encryption key to the one I already had thus saving me the effort of reprogramming 5 or six computers (I have several and the kids bring their laptops around. We wasted some time because although I told him WEP they set it for WPA.

All in all it seems to be working altho they left practically nothing is the way of user guides or instructions.

It has the limitations I mentioned before, the real broadband (fiber with all the channels) goes to the local node, up to a mile away, the twisted pair to the house is limited in bandwidth to about 20 Mbps so they can stream only one HD channel to you at a time, plus the internet and some SD channels. I don't know that that is the solution for ever but I guess it will have to do for now.

They provided all the cables and stuff save for a cable to connect the cable receiver digital audio to my home theater receiver.
For some odd reason the receiver only had fiber optic Toslink output.
I had previously connected my HD OTA tuner with an electrical digital audio cable *having both ports available pn both ends I chose the electrical cable (which I already had).
So I had to order a long toslink cable today to get surround sound.

Complaint: Some of those so called HD channels they provide only have SD material upconverted in a HD channel. I can easily tell one from the lo-def bluriness and two from the 4:3 aspect ration inside a 16:9 window.

[gerti]

We wasted some time because although I told him WEP they set it for WPA.

WEP? You know that WEP is almost pointless, with automated tools cracking it in about 5 minutes, right?

[goslin23]

I had Uverse insalled Saturday as well! I recieved FTTP (fiber to the premise) due to being in a new community. The installer was stoked because it was his 1st install of fiber to the house. All of my STB's are CAT5 (my house was pre-wired with it everywhere). He was here about 7 hours though because he had to swap all the jacks to the RG45's from the RG11's that my builder had installed and was having issues with his connections. I only have 2 TV's so I have an extra STB.

So far I'm liking it, the TV portion looks great, Especially on the SD channels. I haven't seen much of the HD channels just yet, but Discovery HD looked pretty good when I saw it. The sound is crystal clear and I was recieving the Dolby surround when it was available (something the Comcast messed up with an update to the box).

I'm keeping all my Comcast equipment for the trial period, but so far it looks like I might be keeping Uverse (even though it hasn't been 24 hours as of this post) as it is cheaper than Comcrap for way more channels.

I know there will be growing pains and I'm prepared for that as I read everything I could about the service. I hope they get the VOIP before too long as I'm without a landline until then.

-=gos=-