"Steve Turner" wrote

I've been trying to get AT&T to give me a straight answer about whether
U-verse is available at my house, but so far without luck.

My wife had the same situation at her office, which is less than 300 yards
from the aforementioned friends residence, who has had u-verse for about a
year.

Being a hybrid combination of IP/DSL/fiber optic/twisted pair (most places
it's just "fiber to the node" (FTTN), then copper the rest of the way to the
residence), it apparently has the same "distance from the CO/DSLAM"
limitations that DSL has (unless you happen to be lucky enough to actually
have fiber all the way to your residence).

They've also been having a devil of a time with the technology, apparently.

A lot of technical wizards claimed it wouldn't work and are still convinced
AT&T is making a mistake, but AT&T defends u-verse by saying that, whereas
cable broadcasts the entire neighborhoods traffic to every router in the
neighborhood, their system, being IP based, routes only what is actually
destined for each individual router/location.

That, theoretically, should give you more throughput, despite the 2Mb/sec
less advertised speed for the fasted u-verse "broadband" ... we'll see.

(Like I said, I could care less about the TV side)

What I would really like to see available here is Verizon's FIOS ... that's
some awesome "broadband"!

Basically, until we get FTTH (fiber to the home), I'm just viewing U-verse
as a way to shoot a BIG middle finger at Comcast.

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Last update: 12/14/07
KarlC@ (the obvious)