I was duped by the snake oil salesman!!  How you ask?  Because I was so-o naive to associate AT&T with honesty and integrity. 

The salesman came door-to-door through our Carmel, Indiana neighborhood (suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana) and pitched the AT&T U-verse snake oil.  He told me about the television and the internet and the great prices.  I told him we were tired of slower internet speeds at peak "traffic" times like after work and on weekends. 

He said, "No fear, AT&T is here!" (not really, I'm embellishing:) He did say AT&T U-verse would eliminate our internet problems because we wouldn't be sharing a line with our neighbors.  He went on to explain that cable companies provide their service based upon 'hubs' and we share our hub with our neighbors; thus, the slower internet experience when everyone gets online at the same time.  He said that AT&T would run a dedicated line directly to our home and would provide consistent internet speed with no fluctuations due to 'traffic' from our neighbors.  We discussed our set-up- 6 televisions and 3 computers, two of which are wireless. 

No worries . . . AT&T U-verse includes "installation of a High-Speed Wireless Gateway that turns your entire home into a wireless network."

What they don't tell you is, The AT&T Wireless Home Network is incapable of delivering consistent internet speed and service to your wireless home computers.  As a matter of fact, the internet speed fluctuated wildly from "slow as mud" to "only barely adequate".  I still think this was a problem perhaps could have been solved, but they gave up.

 


Comments

Alex Fogel

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:40:08

After months of continuing issues with AT&T U-Verse and dealing with hundreds of their employees at all different levels of the organization, I wouldn't classify the door-to-door agent who sold me on the system as a "snake oil" salesman, but they like so many others in the organization are not provided with all the details on features and limitations which would allow them to communicate them effectively to customers.

For example, their sales personnel, technicians, and customer service reps were unaware of the fact that AT&T had not signed an agreement with Major League Baseball which would allow them to broadcast games. I found this out only after finally getting through to their corporate legal group when the sports package I signed up for had every baseball game in the country blacked out, yet my neighbor with DirecTV was able to view all of them. Similar ignorance exists with their networking equipment, since few of their employees know the connectivity limitations that exist with their gateway router. In order to get most network scanners, IP cameras, or network storage devices to work you need to disable the router on the gateway and use one of your own. I haven't experience any issues with the wireless speed that others have mentioned, but that may be due to the fact that I use my own wireless router when I disabled the router function on the U-Verse gateway.

My bigger concerns with AT&T have been related to their customer service. The annoying and inefficient automated prompts result in every call taking much longer than they should and create aggravation above and beyond the original reason for the call. When you finally do reach a live person, they far too frequently are unable to resolve the issue due to AT&T not providing them with adequate knowledge and resources (see earlier comment). Not one month has gone by where I didn't have to call to get something corrected on my statement, and many corrections (such as getting the previously mentioned sports package removed)take repeated calls. Their technical support is even worse, especially with their network. Present them with any issue beyond a very limited skill set and they want to transfer you to some third-party pay-for-support company who won't talk to you without providing a credit card. Supervisors will offer to credit your account for the cost of the third-party support, but you still have to pay for it up front in order to prove to AT&T that the problems are on their end and not yours.

 



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A consumer report and review of AT&T U-verse gateway wireless home network warning consumers that wireless internet speeds may be far less than advertised. AT&T wireless internet speeds may be highly inconsistent. Signal strength will show as 'excellent' but webpages will load very, very slowly. Much slower than cable internet for wireless. Speed test your internet connection. AT&T U-verse, Indianapolis, Carmel, Indiana. Bright House Networks, Indianapolis, Carmel, Indiana.