While they couldn’t get my dvr box to work again, they had a list of steps for me to take to see if we could recover it. None of them worked, but I tried them anyways. Eventually they wanted me to do a factory reset of the dvr, which I was somewhat reluctant to do (given that i’d lose my recordings) but was out of alternatives. It didn’t work. It also takes about 20 minutes for it to not work and display a red X on my screen. At one point during all of this the first tech I talked to asked for permission to go into my residential gateway to see if there were any funky settings there that could cause problems. In the process he also knocked my whole network offline as he, without telling me he had done so, turned off the DMZPlus mode for my non-uverse router. As a result my router stopped passing traffic from my internal network, taking it all offline. I’m not so much upset that he changed a setting, rather that he didn’t tell me he was doing so (I’d have told him not to) . Anyway, I ended up resetting the dvr 4 times at the behest of AT&T’s tech support. Since that still wouldn’t resolve it, they told me a tech would have to come out to the house to take a look at it and probably replace it. That was around 930am when I talked to them. They told me they will have a tech here between 10 and noon today. Yes, 10am – 12 pm today. Less than three hours from the incident. With Comcast, any such repair or replacement would take until next week sometime to happen, certainly not less than 3 hours.

So, while I’m dissapointed that my DVR box died so quickly and unexpectedly, I’m definitely impressed with the speed and responsiveness of their technical support compared to Comcast. I was able to get someone on the phone in about a minute, they were moderately competent, they weren’t in India somewhere so I could actually understand them and they scrambled a repair guy to fix the issue pretty fast. Now we just have to wait and see how things go with the repair, if the tech shows up, etc. I’ll update this post when they’ve got everything taken care of.

[update 1]: Half hour after getting off the phone with tech support the repair tech who is scheduled to come out and fix everything called, said he’d be here in about a half hour, making the time from getting off the phone with tech support and the arrival of the tech just about one hour. I don’t care who you are, that’s just impressive.

[update 2]: The repair tech was just here and was able to get the DVR to reset properly. He checked the coax jack in the wall (installed by comcast) and put in a new one, as soon as he did the dvr box was able to reset itself properly and came up without a problem.

Around 9am I got a call from Mark, the tech who was assigned my install. He said he was on his way and would be there shortly. Sure enough, a few minutes later he arrived and I started showing him around the house. Unlike comcast’s techs who I’d had out to the house several times, he never once complained or griped about having to do some wiring (he had to run some cat5) – nor did he leave any messes. His cable runs were neatly done and he used a vacuum to tidy up the areas he had been working in.

The Install took until around 4pm, which was in the range of 5-8 hours that AT&T suggested it would take. The service, so far, seems to work fairly well. It’s sufficiently different from Comcast to require me to re-learn some things, but that’s half the fun of a new service. I’m definitely digging the extra channels. And the ability to record up to 4 shows at once (in SD). The installer did tell me that they’re working on increasing that to 8 shows , 4 in HD.I’m tired right now, I’ll try to write a more meaningful post on my initial impressions of U-Verse. So far, though, it’s good.

Overall I am both looking forward to, and dreading, the Install on Monday. This is an older house and the wiring for these kinds of services is not easy. I’ve heard reports from some people that the AT&T installers are able to run cat5 to the TV’s for the set top boxes – I’m not sure yet if I’m going to want them to do that, or if I’m going to want them to use the existing Coax. I may just bite the bullet and have them do the cat5. We’ll see. They also are quoting me about 5-8 hours for the install, so this ought to be interesting.

Once I’ve got it all set up and such I will post on here the details