Cable/Internet/Phone Providers (San Antonio, Anton: restaurants, airports, to move)

[rd2007]

sounds like the PR person for at&t is posting in here..

I'm interested in knowing how digital cable is at a road block though. They keep adding new services, which tends to not indicate a road block. also, at&t is unionized and this guarantees chronically escalating costs.. I don't work for either company

[cwh]

Originally Posted by rd2007

sounds like the PR person for at&t is posting in here..

I'm interested in knowing how digital cable is at a road block though. They keep adding new services, which tends to not indicate a road block. also, at&t is unionized and this guarantees chronically escalating costs.. I don't work for either company

Cable does have a bandwidth crunch and the main cause at his point is HDTV. Timewarner is going with switched digital(iptv for cable) and it yeilds significant bandwidth savings. However it is not as elegant as pure iptv as they must decide in advance what the must carry channels are.
They can also remove the analog channels. 10 SD or 2 HD channels will fit in the same space as a single analog channel. They can also switch to mpeg4 compression, however they are quite entrenched with mpeg2 STB/QAM tuners.

[nuyoriqua]

hey, you may want to check again, because I also have ADT and was still able to get the digital bundle here. I've had it for a year now, no problems at all. In SC, I could not get it because they said it was not compatible but here in sa it was.

Originally Posted by hadleyzoo

Well my DH finally got on the phone with TW after me asking him on a daily basis if he's called about our bill. When we moved here 3 years ago we were paying right at $100 for digital cable and wireless internet. I think we locked that rate in for 2 years. Well, our bill has consistently gone up over the last year. $10 here...$3 there...etc. Now we are at just under $160 a month (and no we don't order movies--this is just for wireless internet and the digipac 1000 with one DVR). Got him to call and we are locked in at $94.95 a month for 2 years. They tried to get us to do the digital phone...but since we also have fire alarms tied in to our alarm system we can't do it. I called ADT---Texas law requires that if you have fire alarms being monitored they must be connected to a land line.

[Primo]

Originally Posted by rd2007

sounds like the PR person for at&t is posting in here..

I'm interested in knowing how digital cable is at a road block though. They keep adding new services, which tends to not indicate a road block. also, at&t is unionized and this guarantees chronically escalating costs.. I don't work for either company

No, I just decided to switch to U-verse after my whole street had switched. I did some research on IPTV and I think both IPTV and AT&T's Uverse are great. I was a loyal Time warner customer for 15 years and was completely happy, although I didn't have a choice back then. And I think everyone knows Time Warner guaranteed a price increase every 12-18 months , union or not.
Everyone keeps saying, that U-verse AT&T prices are going to go up. Well for the past year and right now I am still paying less. I don't understand why everyone doesn't take advantage of the situation right now and get the cheaper service.
Again, this is all personal preference. I've had both Time warner and U-verse. I would not go back to Time Warner. I have never had Dish and have never heard good things about it and it is cheaper than Time warner. To be honest, even if U-verse was slightly more expensive than Time Warner, I would still get it. I think the overall quality is that much better than Time Warner.

As for pricing, I think it will stablize. The overall prices might go up or down. We all like to assume prices will go up, but there is the possibility that Time Warner will reduce their prices to match U-verse and Dish. I think it will end up like cell phone service. The basic plans will be priced the same for all providers and the service options will determine how expensive your bill is.

[diljaey]

Primo are you saying that u-verse is better due to quality or functionality? Can you let us know why you feel it is THAT much better that you would even be willing to pay more for it than you are now? I am personally using Time Warner due to faster internet speeds but have been contemplating switching over to att. I just wish they had more HD channels and not sure if they are planning to add more soon. The other thing I noticed is that you can only record/watch one HD channel at a time, Time Warner allows you to record two HD channels at the same time. As you can see, I love my HD :-)

[Primo]

Originally Posted by diljaey

Primo are you saying that u-verse is better due to quality or functionality? Can you let us know why you feel it is THAT much better that you would even be willing to pay more for it than you are now? I am personally using Time Warner due to faster internet speeds but have been contemplating switching over to att. I just wish they had more HD channels and not sure if they are planning to add more soon. The other thing I noticed is that you can only record/watch one HD channel at a time, Time Warner allows you to record two HD channels at the same time. As you can see, I love my HD :-)

Things I like about U-verse
- The picture quality on HD and regular channels is noticiabily better
- More HD channels, more channels in general
- you can set you DVR via internet
- I like the menu interface, very much like a computer menu
- The playboy channel - the full real channel
- Less expensive

Things I dont like about U-verse
- Can't record and watch a different HD channel at the same time
- their remote sucks, but I don't use it anyway
- Their cable box needs to be rebooted on a regular basis because of updates

[rd2007]

Hopefully they both do good, because competition benefit consumers. I do like the idea of programming via the internet and hopefully TWC will borrow that feature..

Does the u-verse have a hard drive in the DVR? A coworker of mine had an issue with hers (it wouldn't delete a program) and the wording of the error made it seem like the program was stored on a server upstream.

Has anyone ever tried connecting a DVR to a computer via the USB connection? I always meant to try that, but never got around to it.

[rd2007]

I just came across this.. AT&T U-verse batteries going supernova - Engadget

[yosoyway]

We recently switched to U-verse from TWC.

Pros: More channels at a lower price, a box for each TV, nice picture quality.

Cons: Internet seems slower than RR, you can only watch 4 TV's at once and if you are recording something it counts as 1, no caller ID on TV.

We've only had it a couple of days so I haven't been able to mess with it.

As far as connecting computer or other equipment to USB, that is something that will be upcoming. It will allow you to do several things but tech didn't give details.

Also regarding the 4 streams, it should be upgraded to 6 in a couple of months.

[Primo]

I don't understand why a lot of people comment that their internet is slow or seems slow. What exactly is slow? Just surfing web pages? Your ping when playing an online game? Loggin into your company network? The hours it takes to download a full length movie?

I do a lot of online gaming and have a high performance PC ( 3g dual core, 2G of 667mhz RAMM, Dual 256 video cards)..and Ive had DSL, RR, and Uverse...I have never noticed a difference in speed of what I need to do with the internet. My pages loaded the same, my ping for online games was the same...and typically low compared to the other players. And as far as huge downloads such as movies, it would depend on what site it was and how they governed their downloads. Most recently when I converted from a 1.5 DSL to the Pro Uverse speed, which is 3.0....I noticed absolutely no difference in what I nornally do.