AT&T DSL vs. U-Verse

Can anyone explain the difference between the two? I currently have DSL at 3Mbps and I see that U-Verse can also provide the same speeds. This has me wondering if the speed is somehow more reliable? I'm hoping someone might be able to explain the technology that is being used.

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YFZblu

U-Verse can provide high speeds - 50Mbps in some areas (not mine, otherwise I'd be on board). U-verse uses fiber optic technologies and IIRC transmits cable television AND internet, much like a cable connection does

I'm just going off what I heard in a telemarketing call

Unlike Verizon Fios though, you won't get fiber to your premises. It will be copper to your house.

veritas_libertas

Interesting. Sounds promising. It should be significantly faster than DSL I would imagine. I would like to hear from anyone who has moved from AT&T DSL to U-Verse on much of an improvement it was for them.

coffeeluvr

Switched over in August....great move. I went from 6Mbps to 24Mbps(highest offered in my area). I got a killer deal on TV, VoIP, and Internet bundle package...plus a $300 visa card to boot.

it_consultant

This thread motivated me to upgrade to 40 down and 5 up through Century Link.

veritas_libertas

Okay, that was just mean....

it_consultant

I am fortunate to be in an NFL city AND a city with employers like HP, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, the old Qwest HQ, etc.

gc8dc95

I don't know anything about those services, but 50mbps is now available in my area. I am going to upgrading soon

YFZblu

Comcast cable offers a 105Mb cable option in my area. $199/mo...I've nearly called for it a dozen times.

tpatt100

199 a month? I can wait a few extra seconds and keep my 35 dollar a month cable internet bill lol

YFZblu

Yeah, that's the thing - Right now with Comcast my cable and internet combined is something like $49. Still savoring a low price after getting gouged by Cox Communications in Phoenix for years...

Paperlantern

tpatt100 wrote: »

199 a month? I can wait a few extra seconds and keep my 35 dollar a month cable internet bill lol

No joke, my provider just upped me from 8Mbps to 15Mbps. My upstream was always 1Mbps as well, however I've been consistently at 2Mbps up for several weeks now, which is GREAT for no extra money I'm at 15/2 instead of 8/1. For me once you gets he pointed about 2MB/sec downloads, it's all gravy after that. I'm more concerned about the upstream because I host an FTP server for myself and about two dozen friends, as well as two minecraft servers. Honestly if you told me you would get me twice as much upstream but you had to cut m down in half I'd jump on it in a second. 8/4 would rock for me.

it_consultant

YFZblu wrote: »

Comcast cable offers a 105Mb cable option in my area. $199/mo...I've nearly called for it a dozen times.

Its a lie. You will be lucky to get half of that on a regular basis. I had a client that was sold on that, the internet was absolutely NOT slow, but they were nowhere near 105 down and 50 up. I know this because I pushed backups over those links, on net they should have been close-ish, but they weren't.

Mike-Mike

veritas_libertas wrote: »

Can anyone explain the difference between the two? I currently have DSL at 3Mbps and I see that U-Verse can also provide the same speeds. This has me wondering if the speed is somehow more reliable? I'm hoping someone might be able to explain the technology that is being used.

I was an AT&T DSL Service Tech for 6 years, but I got laid off right when the U-Verse was rolling out...

The u-verse is a different type of dsl, like regular dsl is ADSL I believe and U-Verse is VDSL.....

this is roughly 3 years ago, so all that may not be quite right, but there certainly is different equipment providing the reg DSL signal vs the U-Verse. The DSL normally (but not always) originated from the Central Office, whereas the U-Verse usually came from a SLC next to a Crossbox, that should be within like x amount of feet from your home, a relatively close distance as opposed to miles away like the CO..

At that time, U-Verse was their new toy, so it was hands down the best option, we went through neighborhoods and cleaned up and replaced cable to make sure you would get a crystal clear signal, whereas reg DSL was normally just running over standard twisted pair for POTS line, with just a splitter outside your home

The U-Verse is providing your tv signal over the internet, so you would get a cranked up internet signal, so they could provide the tv service. They realized some people didn't want tv, but wanted cranked up internet, so they would offer U-Verse as internet only with the hopes that you would one day get the tv service. But regardless, for the U-Verse to work (internet or tv) you had to have a nice clean line

also note, they laid me off when they had record profits.... so screw them, go to your cable provider

ptilsen

it_consultant wrote: »

Its a lie. You will be lucky to get half of that on a regular basis. I had a client that was sold on that, the internet was absolutely NOT slow, but they were nowhere near 105 down and 50 up. I know this because I pushed backups over those links, on net they should have been close-ish, but they weren't.

It's no lie. One incident of it not working as expected does not make it a lie. Even if this had been a widespread experience for you, I would equate it to your area, because my experience has been very different.

I've implemented Comcast 50mbps and 100mbps circuits for at least 15 different SMB sites. I've never had an issue with bandwidth being less than advertised at either data rate. My own Comcast connection has been at about 60/11 for three years, even though I pay for 50/10. I've left it downloading hundreds of GBs for hours at a time, never had it drop below 60 or been hit by any cap. The business I had go to higher-speed Comcast circuits used them frequently, too. One in particular had constantly-up site-to-site VPNs with frequently large file replication, and performance was absolutely as advertised, actually pretty shocking for CIFS traffic over VPN.

I'm not saying I've never had bad experiences with Comcast. I have. But I've had bad experiences with AT&T, Century Link and Qwest before it, Integra, and so on. I had a friend living in an apartment with Comcast not get advertised speeds. He complained for three months until the finally fixed it, and they didn't charge him for his Internet service at all until it was fixed. I'm not saying three months is a great turnaround time, but Comcast will fix it if you complain and for business customers, they usually fix it pretty quickly.

Even my experience is anecdotal and perhaps only applies to the Twin Cities metro, but a good 20 circuits or so and no bandwidth issues is pretty good, from where I'm sitting. Almost every DSL circuit I've ever seen was below-advertised, I've seen a few T1s with latency issues and frequent outages, and I've seen other cable providers (Charter, e.g.) have severe problems. I've not seen serious outage issues on Comcast and again, I've only heard of others experience speed issues.

it_consultant

It was widespread against many links they claimed to have 100 MB connections on. On initial connection you will be close to their advertised speed; which they will point out when you go to their speed test site. They do, however, quickly throttle the connection down on persistent connections. I eventually pulled Comcast from these sites in favor of more expensive and "slower" COE solutions. I easily had better experiences on 10-20 MB connections.

I have no problem deploying Comcast business class for many clients who don't have the need for persistent bandwidth. In the couple of cases I have personal experiences with, it was VMWARE backups to remote locations. For medical clients who use Citrix to connect to a remote provider, Comcast is great. I have also deployed 40/5 DSL which works great for what it is.

Comcast in Denver does have an uber business class here based on fiber/coe which compete with TWTelecom, CenturyLink, etc in the area which I presented to this client in question. A competing telco consultant convinced them NOT to take that option and went with a 10 MB connection built over 7 T1s on XO. Stupid decision, IMHO, but they wanted to stay with XO for some reason.

veritas_libertas

@Mike-Mike: Thanks for the more technical and inside information. This is what I was looking.

Mike-Mike

veritas_libertas wrote: »

@Mike-Mike: Thanks for the more technical and inside information. This is what I was looking.

you're welcome, it's about time I did something useful on this board, instead of lurk and post nonsense jokes

powerfool

As Mike-Mike said, U-Verse was AT&T's easier way to get to fiber-to-the-home, compared to Verizon's FiOS. With FiOS, Verizon ran fiber all the way to your connecting device. That is extremely costly, and Verizon sold off much of their FiOS to another carrier. AT&T's approach was to bring fiber to your neighborhood, for now; this is called fiber-to-the-node. This has also proven to be very costly and AT&T has stopped rolling this out. New U-Verse deployments now rely on using two-pairs from the CO to your home and binding them, each being VHDSL. This achieves roughly 60Mbps.

I am quite disappointed because I was told that U-Verse would be in my neighborhood by October 2008. It is October 2012 and I still don't have U-Verse. I signed up for the notification... never got one. My mother-in-law, which is serviced out of the same CO, got U-Verse late last year. I opened a ticket and had it escalated, but nothing. I was going to see if they could just bind two DSL lines for me, as I just want faster Internet... I don't have TV service outside of local TV, Netflix Hulu Plus, and Amazon Instant. They wouldn't do that either.

So, I called the devil (Comcast) and got cable Internet. I abhor them... so this wasn't easy. Anyhow, I have it and the raw bandwidth is great... but they try to throttle certain things with DNS... so, I still have my AT&T DSL too, and I use that for all DNS traffic (I moved it to the second slowest package and asked for the promo rate to keep the price down). It works out great because now I have 400 GB of download available to me per month, combined. I can do rudimentary load balancing by changing devices' default gateways..., or I guess I could do ARP spoofing to do that, as well.

veritas_libertas

@Powerfool: Thanks. I'm guessing my area is probably one of the binded areas. I'm actually out in the country, and one house away from cable. A little frustrating, but when I started getting approached by AT&T about U-Verse I started to wonder if it was a scam or actually better.