I'm so happy the government shot down their merger.
I'm praying for google fiber to get in my area or for att to up their speeds over fucking 18.
I work for AT&T Uverse as a premises technician...Near your house is a metal box...The older ones have a picture of a Bell on it…this is the cross connect box...insiders call it the SAC box…near it is a much newer box with an electric meter on it…insiders call this the VRAD…The Uverse fiber ends there and it generates the Uverse signal…
Uverse, when it was originally engineered, was designed for fiber to the homes everywhere. This would have made the service much more “robust”…But the company executives decided that the engineers had to make do with as much of what was already in place as possible.
When AT&T was just voice telecom, the splicing techniques used were very forgiving by the fact that the waves carried by the pairs of wires were very long and weren’t significantly compromised by standard splicing and wire dress techniques of the period. When linemen would splice they would un-twist the pair at the ends in order to make it easier to use butt-connectors.
Fast forward to the digital era:
The Uverse signal can only go down 3000 feet of twisted pair wire from the VRAD. And this is with the wire pairs being in good condition, with the cable sheathing retaining it’s weather proofing, and cable splicing done with accordance with new lead dress standards for digital signals.
Every place along the F2 (the cable that goes to the houses from the Cross Box) where there is a splice that was done to old voice standards, there is an impedance mismatch that is similar in effect to driving down Interstate 10 at 95 MPH and encountering a section of pavement that is 6 inches higher than the rest. The Digital signals get reflected and interfere with other digital bits coming down the line.
Also:
If the cable sheathing is leaky, the impedance will change according to weather conditions…The upshot being that the Uverse tech will get it working one day…and the next week when the weather is different, the bit errors make your internet and TV services go to hell.
The company has given up on the Rube Goldberg bullshit and is inaugurating “GigaPower” service. This is the name they gave to putting in Fiber all the way into the residences…something they should have done from the start.
Everyplace where Verizon is the landline phone company, they put fiber to the house and called the service FIOS. It differs from Uverse in fundamental technical ways, but because they put fiber all the way to the homes, it works more reliably.
