Last week, I gave up and ordered Uverse with Internet only from AT&T. I really didn’t want to, and I may still tell them to go to hell, but at this point it appears to be the only way I can get high-speed ( > 5MB) connectivity into my house for less than a couple hundred bucks a month.
The first hurdle was getting them to sell me Internet-only. I have Vonage, and I’m very happy with it; I see no reason to go with AT&T’s phone service. I have DirecTV with a real Tivo; there is absolutely no reason to go with AT&T’s retarded DVR technology, HD be damned. But you can’t sign up for net-only Uverse online; you have to go to the phone, where you talk to an idiot.
Well, that’s not fair. The dude I got might not have been an idiot — but if he wasn’t, he was a liar. You pick.
The point of contention here is that I asked, over and over, will ordering Uverse disconnect my DSL? I have a 3MB down/768 up circuit here already, and I wanted to keep it so I’d have a fallback if the Uverse sucked. Over and over the idiot/liar assured me that yes, I could keep the DSL, it wouldn’t go away, it’s completely separate, etc. Fine; I ordered it, and scheduled Tuesday installation.
This morning, of course, we had no Internet. After lots of local troubleshooting and a phone call to my ISP, it turns out that yes, AT&T deprovisioned my line. Getting it back would be basically re-ordering the service from scratch. I called AT&T Uverse support and explained to them what had happened, and they were of course all about “well, he shouldn’t have told you that, because it’s not true, we regret the error, etc.”
I have one word for that: Bullshit. AT&T doesn’t care. They never care. They’re AT&T, and they will keep screwing customers as long as they possibly can. The call center I ordered Uverse from probably has a fucking sign on the wall encouraging the drones to say anything and everything to get a customer to sign up; if they don’t, it’s implicit in the comp plan. And now, of course, I’m on the hook – it’ll take weeks to get my DSL back, but some dude in a truck is theoretically showing up here tomorrow to set up Uverse. Gotcha!
The not-quite-so-dingy side is that I got them to ditch the install fee ($150) over this, but that’s cold comfort since the Glenbrook Valley types got a no-fee install without even asking.
Here’s the really annoying part: I have two copper lines into the house, only one of which has been active. If ATT had been honest about how DSL and Uverse interacted, I could have ordered the Uverse onto the other line and kept the DSL after all. Instead, because of their incompetent/sociopathic salesjerks, I’ve basically lost a day of work over it.
So, AT&T? Fuck you. Fuck you twice. I tried to avoid you, and when I finally gave in you were right there with a “gotcha” you clearly care nothing about. Die in a fire. Seriously. In the meantime, I’m shopping for non-Uverse broadband. Even at $65 a month, it’s leaving a pretty shitty taste in my mouth.
My dad has the whole Uverse package because he’s an “if it ain’t turnkey or if I have to write more than one check, fuck it” kind of guy. Apparently, in his neighborhood, the signal runs to a central point in the subdivision and gets routed out on traditional lines to the houses. Some houses can’t get HD because they’re too far from this hub and the secondary signal can’t get to them. Dad’s house is apparently on the line. So on the line, in fact, that one room gets a better version of the signal than another. The problem with my explanation is that I’m translating that which my father understood the techie to say rather than what the guy actually said. For whatever reason, if the blue HD light isn’t on in the main room, his bedroom TV gets no signal, and periodically the image freezes on all of the TVs and picks up again a few seconds later. It usually does this when someone says something important, or Alabama has just snapped the ball.
Were I a better son, I would have tried to figure out what was going on, but AT&T was supposed to have been out last week to fix it and I didn’t want to monkey around and make it worse. Dad is one step away from telling AT&T to shove it up their collective ass and going Dish.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o
“We’re the phone company. We don’t care; we don’t have to.”
They all suck. I use comcast and everytime there shit equipment goes down ( once a quarter) we have to call and tell them we don’t want their fucking internet application for our network, they run their mouth for 15 minutes and eventually agree to turn the shit off in the modem. It is very annoying. Note this happens once a quarter. They do have pretty fast connection though. I have to order cable with it which I do not use. Still have an att land line. What is wrong with their DSL that you changed? Have considered many times switching to their DSL.
Speed. Can’t get over about 3MB with DSL where I live, and Comcast is a nonstarter for me. Uverse is promising 18MB.
@patrick: Yeah, go Dish. Uverse is only interesting for net connectivity. Dish and DirecTV probably give better HD signals, and Vonage is probably a better phone company.