I just went through the most grueling technology hades over the past 3 weeks. Net of it : I am a new UVerse customer- installed it on 4/13/12 (I dumped TW Cable, box constantly recycling, pixelated channels, internet slowdowns during the day. I work at home ) . Friday the 13th was an omen as UVerse install day.
I am a happy camper today, (very happy) but for 3 weeks I was on the verge of self-cumbusting.
Talk about nightmare problems- the service was "up" the day the installer left, but the very next day I became "familiar" gateway recycle screens- losing connection, resetting, then asks me to shut down my loaded with tabs browser every time- I was down for 1-2 hrs every work day. It failed every day around 2pm. I kept telling the AT&T techs that but they dismissed the "time" constant.
The real issue was navigating AT&T support- their techs kept repeating the same diagnostics every time I called, numerous times in the same day- and I had to call A LOT because my (AT&T) wireless phone would lose the call after being on the phone for hours. My UVerse phone, obviously died along with internet, so I was clinging to that wireless lifeline. Had to re-explain my problem and history to every tech- apparently the annotations on any Customer Problem records are not conveyed or communicated. So picture this: retelling the same story, and adding another experience with every new call, at least 30 times. I was on the phone for at least 10 hours with AT&T over that lost 3 weeks.
They tried increasingly disruptive things- first checking outside lines and facilities- and blaming the problem on that. When the problem kept coming back (at 2pm...) the next thing was testing/resetting my gateway from a distance- which sometimes worked. Then when I kep failing (at 2pm the next day usually), the worst "remote support" tech asked me to push the "little red button" on the back of my gateway. Not only did that NOT fix the problem- it now blew me out of the water with my configured wireless PCs and Printer - that were depending on an SSID and WPA password. And the story from AT&T support was always this: we will (leisurely) put you on our "future" onsite tech schedule, as if I was some teen inconvenienced out of facebook rather than a professional out of work. AT&T does not seem to have a priority or escalation/critical problem system for home residential outages.
So finally.. finally... after yelling, later begging for an onsite rep, they sent someone. It was like an angel from heaven came. This tech pulled out the wires to test and when he realized that fixing a dead jack caused the system to fail again he said that I need new CAT5 cable- and he crawled under my house to do the hard labor of pulling new cable for me. He said the installer should have done that (especially since he left the house with one dead phone jack). He said the gateway probably failed every day at around 2pm because of the aggregated errors that just inundated it by a bad home cable.
<<Halleluja chorus here>> The new cabling solution worked. First trouble free day in 3 weeks.I love Uverse when it works. Not a happy camper when I have problems (understatement of the year)- AT&T support needs a LOT of reorg to get right with customers.
Message to customers: make sure if you get UVerse, you insist on new cabling if your house is older (like mine was)
Message to AT&T: oh.my.gosh. PLEASE double down on communication between reps, and much better annotated continuity for customer issues, and PLEASE tell reps to call customers back when they lose voice connection, and PLEASE implement a priority support system for people that WORK at home. No one should have to spend 3 weeks and 10+ hours on the phone with AT&T, rexplaining problems over and over and over and OVER, and then have to beg AT&T (literally beg) to come to their home to fix a problem.
