AT&T U Verse any good?

I'm a AT&T retiree and there are support issues. The company is so large and has reduced headcount so much and service always suffers first. The philosophy has always been get a product to market, to get revenue flowing, and fix it later. It was the way we always did it. I still remember what a nightmare DSL was when initially rolled out. Beyond these problems I am not, yet, convinced that IP broadcast HD video is the platform of the future.

Thanks for the insight, Narrod. Present company excluded, of course. :) My perception is that a lot of the "phone help" service stuff is farmed out off shore, and this creates communication issues. For example, that I share my father's name was a source of great difficulty. Is that how AT&T does everything now?

John

I've been retired for three and a half years so I can't speak about current operation. I do know that all call center traffic was handled in-house (or stateside agents) due to problems with offshore support. It may have changed. The cost savings make it awfully attractive for large companies. AT&T and other large companies are pretty good at gauging customer tolerance before there is a significant drop in revenue. They will go right to the edge and a little over before backing off to protect revenue. I was a Sales VP so my perspective is from the customer's point of view. Service was never good enough and prices were never low enough. Factor this in when evaluating my opinion. I was not an engineer, strategic planner or in finance. They all have significantly different views than those of us in sales.

I am a Sr. Director at AT&T and if anybody has an issue that has not been resolved I would be happy to help getting it resolved.

I just made the switch from Directv to Uverse. Here are my observations.

directv: better hd picture, more hd channels, easier to navigate (maybe because I was used to it), better hardware.

Uverse: Good HD picture, but not as good as directv. SD picture is better than directv though. You can record 2 hd shows and 2 sd shows at the same time. Whole house dvr is very nice. Can schedule recordings online. Can bundle services with the uverse internet making it slightly cheaper than what I was paying for directv and dsl.

The things I really don't like about Uverse is the hardware. The fan in my DVR makes a high pitched whining noise that drives me crazy. I need to unplug the DVR if I want to listen to music. Urge radio is horrible compared to XM that directv offered, sound quality is even worse than XM and content is lacking. The Motorola DVR does not pass 5.1 audio through HDMI so an optical cable is required. They don't offer Fuel TV in HD!!!