On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 09:09:02 -0600, "Swingman" wrote:

"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).

That's what those new refrigerator sized boxes on the poles are for.

U-Verse actually has a more stringent distance limitation than data
DSL, so the boxes aren't far from the customer. The usable distances
change based on the exact cable makeup and quality in a specific
'hood, and in some cases, the presence of certain other types of
circuits in the cables. Individual neighborhoods are
"pre-conditioned", where bridgetaps are manually removed, records are
verified, and bad pairs are cleared.

There are also times when two neighbors might actually be fed from
different crossboxes. In this case, he's got it and you can't get it.
Sometimes, these borders make not make sense, as the cable stubs were
laid out based on dialtone and "proposed" development , and some
undergrounds can run through back yards.

In other cases, cable records are inaccurate, so a specific customer's
U-Verse applicability is not available to the rep on the phone, or the
self-serve web lookup utilities. "at&t" still has different record
keeping facilities at the different companies absorbed by SBC, and
then with SBC's purchase of AT&T. There is no nationwide record
keeping system, so accuracy of availability quotes can vary.