Ditching U-Verse today for TW..

[jerrodh]

Call U-Verse first and tell them you like their service when it works, in its current configuration it does not work. And that if they cannot fix it you will cancel. If they don't do anything cancel and call TW. Make sure they don't leave you house with the install without you being happy with the internet connection.

[90G60]

I'm moving in 2 weeks and can't wait to switch back from AT&T. I too went from TW to Uverse with the promise of faster internet, more channels, and a lower bill. While the bill is lower the internet is terribly slow, and the DVR and wireless DVR constantly need rebooted and re-synced. I eventually called and complained. They scheduled and missed three technician visits before just sending me a new modem and offering a bill credit.

 

I realize that TW customer service sucks too, but at least it was always reliable.

[Putty]

Here is a speed test connected to my AC router that's one floor below me. I'm in my bedroom on my phone... I am paying for 18mb

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v640/CLovaR1/Screenshot_2015-07-14-22-02-27_zpsl0kgfw6y.png

 

Here is my iPad from same location connected to their router that's in my basement, two floors below me.

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v640/CLovaR1/20150714_220351_zpsejvkan6f.jpg

 

 

I ran several tests with roughly the same results. They will be here tomorrow from 8-12. If this isn't resolved when he leaves, I am cancelling right after.

[2 Sweet]

I've had them all. WOW is the best at everything, hands down.

[ShowHBK]

And you pay for 18!?! You should show them these photos and have them refund you an entire month. Gotta play hardball to get whmat you want sometimes.

[LJ]

I always feel the need to share my WOW experience. It was total shit. I switched to WOW from TW, but never disconnected TW. WOW came out to install and went through 2 boxes before they got one that worked. Then the tv picture was constantly breaking up, so the following Monday they ran a new feed. Still happened and then it stormed and the tv and internet constantly started going out. Wed morning they came out and buried the line and cut it in the process. I got home around 4 and called. After 45 minutes on the phone they confirmed "yep this is probably what happened, we can have someone come out Friday and fix it" Uh no, you just cut the cable and you want ME to wait for you to come fix your screw up? I canceled right then and told them I would not be paying for any service, because I felt I had not received any. They had the balls to send me a bill 2 days later for a whole month's worth. a week later they send me another bill for half a month. I called again and told them I would not be paying and they mentioned "oh there must be an error" . 2 weeks later I get a bill for $20 and they claim that I will be sent to collections. I called and bitched again and FINALLY got a $0 balance bill. I say stay the fuck away from WOW. I have had nothing but good service from TW. We recently dropped cable due to our lack of watching and went internet only. I had more outages in 5 days with WOW than I have had in 10 years with Insight/WOW.

 

TL/DR- WOW blows

[87GT]

I had a bad experience with WOW too. TW is a shitty company but at least they give you the speeds they advertise. After shopping around I refuse to go with anyone but TW for internet. If I needed a 2nd option I would pick up verizon wireless 4G internet.

[2 Sweet]

They had the balls to send me a bill 2 days later for a whole month's worth. a week later they send me another bill for half a month. I called again and told them I would not be paying and they mentioned "oh there must be an error" . 2 weeks later I get a bill for $20 and they claim that I will be sent to collections. I called and bitched again and FINALLY got a $0 balance bill.

 

I had a similar issue with TW, except it took those fucktards YEARS to correct. They were by far the most incompetent company I have ever dealt with and it's not even close.

[ShowHBK]

Every cable company is different and each person has their own experience. I have never had any issues with WOW and our experience has been very positive. TW has been known to throttle connections without people knowing... that shit makes me mad.

[LJ]

Refusing to come out and fix their screw up is not just an "well that's your experience". I spoke with every manager I could and they did me a "favor" by offering to come out 1.5 days later. It's not like it was something that just happens, like equipment dying. I've never had to wait more than 24 hours for an issue with TW, even on weekends.

[2 Sweet]

Refusing to come out and fix their screw up is not just an "well that's your experience". I spoke with every manager I could and they did me a "favor" by offering to come out 1.5 days later. It's not like it was something that just happens, like equipment dying. I've never had to wait more than 24 hours for an issue with TW, even on weekends.

 

Yeah in your case I would tell them to fuck off, I don't blame you one bit for being pissed, that's unacceptable.

 

tbh I think all cable companies leave a lot to be desired from a customer service standpoint

[bicranium]

I've had basically everything available in central Ohio and no service is perfect.

 

Had Insight when they were around and they were awful because they didn't even want their central Ohio market. Obviously they sold everything to Time Warner eventually but I had jumped ship even before then and gone to U-verse.

 

Being a national company I was worried about customer service but a friend I've known since 3rd grade ended up doing my install and would come out whenever we had an issue which wasn't often but the overall quality of service due to the way U-verse is set up is just bad. Sharing bandwidth between TV/internet is just stupid. The instant you have more than 2 HD streams going (recording 1, watching 1) you are eating into your internet bandwidth. Nope.

 

Luckily WOW had just made themselves available in my area so I switched to them. They were solid for a while but their equipment was very unreliable (probably replaced our Ultra gateway every 3-4 months resulting in lost recordings/having to reschedule recordings on the new boxes) and early last year they bought some southern ISP's to expand their territory and spread themselves too thin resulting in poor quality of service.

 

Because of that I decided to switch to Time Warner for internet and DirecTV for TV. With Time Warner I used my own modem so there was no rental fee and I wouldn't have to deal with low quality/used equipment anymore. Never had an issue. We had DirecTV and Dish in the past and it wasn't great during storms/snow/whatever but people had told me it was better so I gave it a shot. Unfortunately it's not much better. Any kind of serious storm will absolutely result in some form of signal loss. Even just heavy cloud cover usually will. And this was not a self install, this was done by DirecTV themselves.

 

Once my 12-month promotional price for Time Warner was up I switched back to WOW because they sorted out the issues from a year ago and offer more than twice the speed for half the price. After the promotional price ended with Time Warner I was paying $98/month for 50 down/5 up. Now with WOW I'm paying $50/month for 110+ down/10+ up. Using my same modem I was using with Time Warner so no equipment quality issues and no rental fee.

 

I'm on the back end of a 2 year contract with DirecTV and will likely be going back to WOW for TV when that's up. Using the time between now and the end of the contract to research my options for equipment though since their Ultra boxes were so unreliable the last time around. Looking at maybe getting something from TiVo to use with a cable card from WOW.

[87GT]

I've had basically everything available in central Ohio and no service is perfect.

 

Had Insight when they were around and they were awful because they didn't even want their central Ohio market. Obviously they sold everything to Time Warner eventually but I had jumped ship even before then and gone to U-verse.

 

Being a national company I was worried about customer service but a friend I've known since 3rd grade ended up doing my install and would come out whenever we had an issue which wasn't often but the overall quality of service due to the way U-verse is set up is just bad. Sharing bandwidth between TV/internet is just stupid. The instant you have more than 2 HD streams going (recording 1, watching 1) you are eating into your internet bandwidth. Nope.

 

Luckily WOW had just made themselves available in my area so I switched to them. They were solid for a while but their equipment was very unreliable (probably replaced our Ultra gateway every 3-4 months resulting in lost recordings/having to reschedule recordings on the new boxes) and early last year they bought some southern ISP's to expand their territory and spread themselves too thin resulting in poor quality of service.

 

Because of that I decided to switch to Time Warner for internet and DirecTV for TV. With Time Warner I used my own modem so there was no rental fee and I wouldn't have to deal with low quality/used equipment anymore. Never had an issue. We had DirecTV and Dish in the past and it wasn't great during storms/snow/whatever but people had told me it was better so I gave it a shot. Unfortunately it's not much better. Any kind of serious storm will absolutely result in some form of signal loss. Even just heavy cloud cover usually will. And this was not a self install, this was done by DirecTV themselves.

 

Once my 12-month promotional price for Time Warner was up I switched back to WOW because they sorted out the issues from a year ago and offer more than twice the speed for half the price. After the promotional price ended with Time Warner I was paying $98/month for 50 down/5 up. Now with WOW I'm paying $50/month for 110+ down/10+ up. Using my same modem I was using with Time Warner so no equipment quality issues and no rental fee.

 

I'm on the back end of a 2 year contract with DirecTV and will likely be going back to WOW for TV when that's up. Using the time between now and the end of the contract to research my options for equipment though since their Ultra boxes were so unreliable the last time around. Looking at maybe getting something from TiVo to use with a cable card from WOW.

 

I am curious about your WOW internet. Do you know if your neighbors are all WOW customers? You can drive around with your cell phone looking at wireless SSIDs to get an idea. Almost every house on my block has WOW with the same SSID naming convention. When I had WOW the internet would crawl during peak time 7pm-6am. And by crawl I mean slower than DSL. How is yours? Have you tried stress testing your internet connection?

[bicranium]

I am curious about your WOW internet. Do you know if your neighbors are all WOW customers? You can drive around with your cell phone looking at wireless SSIDs to get an idea. Almost every house on my block has WOW with the same SSID naming convention. When I had WOW the internet would crawl during peak time 7pm-6am. And by crawl I mean slower than DSL. How is yours? Have you tried stress testing your internet connection?

 

Not sure how many around me are WOW customers. Have never had issues with slowdown with them. The issues I had that caused me to leave initially were actually ping related but that's been solved now. Haven't had speed issues (due to node overloading) since Insight actually. U-verse was just bad because of the way it's set up. With Time Warner I always got around 57mbps down/6mbps up with my 50/5 plan. With WOW I heard about their speed upgrades and kinda snuck in on the 50/5 tier for the free upgrade to 110/10 and usually get about 120-130mbps down/10mbps up. I'm only getting 1 upstream channel at the moment for some reason though so I've seen people post speed test results on DSLreports with WOW in central Ohio getting 11-12mbps up on a consistent basis.

 

And what do you mean by "stress testing" my internet connection? I Google'd it and found some stuff but do you have something specific you'd want me to run or did you just mean speed test?

 

Here's a speed test...

 

http://www.speedtest.net/result/4520040700.png

 

Here's another from a more "peak" time (10:44PM)...

 

http://www.speedtest.net/result/4479643249.png

 

And one more from around "peak" time (10:15PM)...

 

http://www.speedtest.net/result/4428983176.png

[87GT]

By stress test I meant a few things. Run constant pings on google.com for a few minutes and see if your replies are all around the same time like above. Mine were all over the place and usually more than 1000 ms. Start a download of a large file from a server that you know will max out your downlink (torrent or FTP). Then go to another device and see if you can browse internet normally. Try youtube or netflix. I couldn't do this. Everything ran too slow.

 

It sounds like your node is not overloaded like mine is. I even demanded WOW to run a new wire from the pole to my house and they did. They also replaced my cabling inside my house.

 

This is why I left and went back to Time Warner.

http://i.imgur.com/BzaW766.jpg

[jjjxlr8]

A couple of months ago I switched from AT&T to Time Warner due to internet speed problems and HD TV issues, and the fact that they kept raising the price.

 

Now that I'm with TW, the internet speed is better, but the TV functionality sucks and I still have occasional problems with the HD TV. Price is higher with TW, too. My wife wants to switch back to AT&T.

 

Here's what the internet speed test looks like right now with TW:

 

 

http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k239/jjjxlr8/PC%20Pitstop%20Bandwidth%20Speed%20Test_zpslkqgotax.jpg

[bicranium]

By stress test I meant a few things. Run constant pings on google.com for a few minutes and see if your replies are all around the same time like above. Mine were all over the place and usually more than 1000 ms. Start a download of a large file from a server that you know will max out your downlink (torrent or FTP). Then go to another device and see if you can browse internet normally. Try youtube or netflix. I couldn't do this. Everything ran too slow.

 

It sounds like your node is not overloaded like mine is. I even demanded WOW to run a new wire from the pole to my house and they did. They also replaced my cabling inside my house.

 

Did they ever confirm an overloaded node? It took me a lot of annoying calls and visits from Insight back in 2007 or whenever it was to get them to even admit it was an overloaded node and that mine was 13th or 14th on their list of nodes to be split. I had no other option at the time so it was very, very frustrating. I got free internet for the 5 months or so it took them to eventually split the node but it was supposed to be 15mbps/768kbps and I was only getting around 1mbps/100kbps during peak hours so it might as well have been no internet.

 

Here's 100 pings of google.com...

 

http://i.imgur.com/IDxOy5S.png

 

I do some pretty heavy torrenting and usually just limit the download to 9-10MB/s to leave enough bandwidth for anything else I want to do (gaming, Netflix, etc., etc.). Not sure how it would perform if I maxed it out but I could easily fix that by ticking on QoS on my router. Since I limit my torrents myself I leave it off though.

[87GT]

Did they ever confirm an overloaded node? It took me a lot of annoying calls and visits from Insight back in 2007 or whenever it was to get them to even admit it was an overloaded node and that mine was 13th or 14th on their list of nodes to be split. I had no other option at the time so it was very, very frustrating. I got free internet for the 5 months or so it took them to eventually split the node but it was supposed to be 15mbps/768kbps and I was only getting around 1mbps/100kbps during peak hours so it might as well have been no internet.

 

Here's 100 pings of google.com...

 

http://i.imgur.com/IDxOy5S.png

 

I do some pretty heavy torrenting and usually just limit the download to 9-10MB/s to leave enough bandwidth for anything else I want to do (gaming, Netflix, etc., etc.). Not sure how it would perform if I maxed it out but I could easily fix that by ticking on QoS on my router. Since I limit my torrents myself I leave it off though.

 

You have a great connection there.

 

Wow customer service would never admin to anything. I probably called them 10 different times when the internet ran slow. The techs that came out, or the one tech that came to my house 3 different times did admit that almost everyone on my street has Wow. When I called to cancel my service the lady said something like, "Oh I see you had multiple problems and we could never fix your issue. Let me cancel your service for you". I've never had such an easy experience canceling anything. That is the only thing positive I can say about my Wow experience.

[Zx2guy19]

Damn, I love AT&T. I have U-verse internet and DirectTV satellite and couldn't be happier. We lost connection on our satellite for the first time in 2 years on Sunday night, for about 15 minutes during a storm. My internet never cuts out (occasionally runs slow for 2-3 minutes) and never had an issue with my bill. I've been paying between $39-$44 a month for U-verse for the last 3 years.

 

I would have gotten the cable too if it was available in my area at the time. Now I'm hooked on DTV.

[bicranium]

Damn, I love AT&T. I have U-verse internet and DirectTV satellite and couldn't be happier. We lost connection on our satellite for the first time in 2 years on Sunday night, for about 15 minutes during a storm. My internet never cuts out (occasionally runs slow for 2-3 minutes) and never had an issue with my bill. I've been paying between $39-$44 a month for U-verse for the last 3 years.

 

I would have gotten the cable too if it was available in my area at the time. Now I'm hooked on DTV.

 

U-verse for internet only would probably be tolerable to me. My service with them never went out. All of my issues with them came from the way their service works when you have all of their services. If you only have internet then you never have to worry about what you're watching/recording eating into your bandwidth.

 

And I think where I live satellite just can't be set up well. Have had Dish and DTV at different points and they always have a heck of a time getting the dish set up just right so I'd say the window they have to work with here just isn't big enough to provide any room for error. The signal is pretty much perfect in the diagnostics when the weather is good but the second there's anything remotely heavy going on with the weather it's pretty much guaranteed that we're going to lose signal. Luckily their on-demand stuff is solid, they have all the streaming partnerships (WatchESPN, HBO Go, etc., etc.) and then they even have online streaming straight through them for a lot of channels so if there's something I really need to watch when the signal is being flaky I can still usually find some way to watch it either live or within a reasonable amount of time on demand.

 

You have a great connection there.

 

Wow customer service would never admin to anything. I probably called them 10 different times when the internet ran slow. The techs that came out, or the one tech that came to my house 3 different times did admit that almost everyone on my street has Wow. When I called to cancel my service the lady said something like, "Oh I see you had multiple problems and we could never fix your issue. Let me cancel your service for you". I've never had such an easy experience canceling anything. That is the only thing positive I can say about my Wow experience.

 

I remember canceling WOW in early 2014 and agree it was a nice, easy procedure. Canceling TW a couple weeks ago when I went back to WOW was pretty annoying. I open by telling the lady I already have my service up and running with WOW, it's cheaper than even the promotional price you just stopped giving me and it's faster than anything you offer and she still put me on hold 3 different times to come back with a "better" offer that still cost more than WOW for slower speeds. I wasn't too upset by that because I know it's her job but then she threw some straight up lies on at the end about me now being in a contract with WOW and the price is going to skyrocket and all this other BS.