Not quite a month ago I posted a story on our horrendous experience with AT&T’s U-verse – a combination Internet, phone, and TV service that just wasn’t working for us – after moving into our new house. In case you are interested in how that ended up I decided to share the story with you since it was rather interesting – and pleasant in the end.
Within a few hours of my story publishing I received a phone call on 3 different business lines and an email from someone in AT&Ts Chicago PR department. They were escalating my problem to the office of the president. Once AT&T got their arms around our problems they sent out a really good technician along with his supervisor to address the problems. Basically our most pressing issues boiled down to 3 things that they were able to fix with a few hour visit:
- System knowledge. Pause, rewind, and record are just not available in the first 15 seconds or so of switching to a new channel. This had never been explained to us before.
- Some kind of wiring problem – possibly a short.
- Weak signal. The nice thing about the U-verse set top boxes is that they are wireless. Unfortunately, the signal is just not strong enough to travel from the back of the house on the main level to the front of the house in the basement – about 60 feet – even though the signal strength meter shows several bars. Apparently, when the signal is weak, not all the functionality works as advertised. Once they added another wireless access point in the basement essentially all of our other problems went away.
So, in the end, we’re happy with U-verse now.