We moved into a new place over the summer, and since our old cable provider doesn't offer service to the new neighborhood, we had to choose between a handful of others. AT&T's U-Verse seemed like a good package and range of features, and friends and co-workers had good things to say about them, so we gave them a shot. Their service isn't all contract-based anymore like DSL was, probably because it's all IP-based over fiber optic here, not DSL.
Call #1
End of July, the service was installed. They had to run a new cable from the street as the area had all new service — fiber optic, all that good stuff from the future. We were told someone would be coming out soon to bury it, and to try to keep the cable up off the grass in the meantime to prevent it from being tripped on, pulled out, or mowed over. Fair enough.
Call #2
Within the first two weeks, one of the satellite boxes (the service has one main DVR box and satellite boxes that stream from the DVR on other TVs) had begun displaying very odd behavior — it would work okay for anywhere from 10 seconds to several minutes, but eventually the picture would flicker and go away entirely. If it was taking input via HDMI, the effect was almost instantaneous. The box would lock up hard and need to be powered off. I called to report the problem, and having followed the troubleshooting steps on their site prior to contacting, it was a quick call, ending with a tech being sent out the next day to replace the problem box.
New box arrived, hooked up, worked fine. As the tech was leaving, I noticed the cable outside still hadn't been buried. I asked him if he knew anything about that and he said it was handled by an entirely different department, involving surveyors to scan for pipes and wiring underground so they didn't dig right into something important, and contractors to actually dig and bury. But he checked on it in their system for me. A ticket had been created for the issue and someone should be in touch with us to set up an appointment to do the cable burial soon. Sounds good.
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