Frontier's 'Next Gen' Plan is.....AT&T U-Verse? > Welcome to mediocrity...

Welcome to mediocrity...

Better than 1900s technology that many ADSL users are stuck with 0.768/0.128 or 1.500/0.384 speeds.

I imagine this is what they are doing in my area with fiber in the ground along all of the county highways. While it would be great to get a speed faster than 1.5MBs it would be even better if we didn't have congested circuits. Frontier will never get out of the stone ages at this rate. I can't even get them to fix the constant hum and buzz on the phone line.

reply to trparky
They don't have to offer TV with it. Satellite TV works just fine and looks better than anything AT&T has been able to throw over U-Verse for the sole reason that it's easier to deploy satellites and use MPEG-4 (Or maybe H.264) to the receivers than it is to try to cram the same thing through a VDSL2 line. While I haven't seen U-Verse in person on a TV, I have been sent raw video from someone's Set Top Box from their highest quality channel, and I can say even the worst Satellite provider looks better.

Of course, nothing right now beats Fiber in performance and delivery as seen with FiOS, but if they were smart they'd stay out of the TV business for VDSL2 deployment and leave TV to those on Fiber. Let them open up the pipe for VDSL2+ and use all of it for Internet (which means no more horrible Interleaving requirement for TV data and distance won't be such a big deal as VDSL2+ can reach as far as ADSL2+ does). From that point, just dumb modems with separate, stronger routers would be the way to go. None of these combo unit things that choke as you mention when just enough data gets pushed through them.

And when you get satellite a hurricane will.break it while cable and vdsl2 work just fine.

Hurricanes also do damage physical plant but it certainly does hold up a lot better during storms, so I'll give you that. But as far as I know a good chunk of Frontier areas don't get hit by Hurricanes. Maybe Tornadoes but that's about it.

The reason why I mentioned satellite because in all of the years I've had it, Cable's been down completely than my dish has been down completely, and Cable itself is rarely down around here. Maybe when my Dish got damaged from something hitting it I lost a few stations but it still worked and I fell back on antenna service for the stations I lost. I don't lose TV service during snow storms, and I also don't lose it during thunderstorms.

reply to chgo_man99

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reply to trparky
I'm not a huge U-verse fan (dumped it myself personally for cable/DOCSIS3) but I think it's important not to hysterically overstate its flaws. It's a very successful service.

reply to WhyMe420
But the heavy snow will still degrade picture

reply to MyDogHsFleas
He can easily put xbox behind DMz or more flexible firewall settings.

And uverse service is quite good. It definietly works better than their old dsl.

reply to chgo_man99
I've not had problems with heavy, lake-effect snow messing up our satellite service. We get it all the time here during the winter.

UPnP is a security risk and a router stability issue in many techie minds so it's best to keep it disabled unless it is absolutely needed.

reply to chgo_man99

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reply to MyDogHsFleas

etaadmin:

re U-verse "success" -- you really come across as a hater. Real people keep signing up for real U-verse, not because they "hate" the cable companies, or because they give a crap what kind of conduit comes into their home, but because they're OK with it. A good example is my daughter who just moved to Austin and bought a home. She could have had satellite TV (dish already on the house), Time Warner Cable, or U-Verse. I recommended cable to her... we have DOCSIS 3. She went with U-verse. Why? Because, with their advanced Video over IP technology, you can record 4 shows at once. When I told her she could do that with TWC using 2 DVRs and Whole Home support, she looked at me like that was the stupidest suggestion ever. On top of that U-verse told her they would install boxes over wireless support (which they have now, which is also BTW a big tech advantage for them) and they would not have to mess up her new house with a bunch more cabling in certain rooms. Sold, done, and done.

I have several other friends with U-verse (non tech types) and they are by and large OK with it.

Look, the business evidence is obvious. U-verse is a success by any measure. And it's about to overtake FIOS.

Does it compete with DOCSIS 3? Clearly not in terms of available bandwidth to the home. Certainly the early adopter, need-for-speed people like you and me see the obvious benefits of DOCSIS 3 vs. U-verse. I think the mass curve that cares much about this is a ways off.

re: U-verse "practically dead"

Again way overstated.
I know that AT&T maintains the ability to respond by (a) upgrading their profiles for FTTN, and (b) retrofitting FTTP onto their brownfield FTTN deployments, just as they are currently supporting FTTP to greenfields. They have the hardware, network, provisioning, and support already in place, and they have fiber to a node which can relatively easily be upgraded to be a FTTP node. So they are not out of competitive responses.
Will they execute these responses? I don't know, but they do have significant headroom.

Re: the router

The router is not "a nightmare". It's perfectly adequate for its use case, which is to serve as a home gateway for Internet, TV, and phone. Does it have advanced router capabilities that people setting up an advanced network in their home expect? No. Can you get most of that capability by putting your own damn router in behind the U-verse router? Yes. Does this matter to more than 1% of their subscriber base? No.

I really never understood the whining about the gateway when I had U-verse Internet (before they deployed DOCSIS 3 here and I jumped to it). I am an advanced user, I have a server farm at home, I do software development and testing, and it all worked fine for me. Is it a little tricky to set up port forwarding? Sure, but once you do it once, it's straightforward to do it again.

It's like, you bought an SUV, and you complain it's not a race car. If you want a race car buy a freaking race car!

re: Frontier should license DOCSIS 3

Ummm... what? That makes no sense. Frontier is looking for a DSL replacement over twisted pair. DOCSIS 3 is for coax.

As for the 'success' story of uverse I have nothing more to say. I don't believe the numbers that at&t is providing the public and I use at&t's history of twisted statements (lies) to support my point.

reply to trparky
I think his point was simple, from business and not technical standpoint.

They can upgrade FFTN to FTTP in future, but it will cost them for sure and in the end more than going straight with FTTP like Verizon did with FIOS. But hey if they can get money for upgrades from short-sighted short-term shareholders rather than profits they make on customer or by borrowing from banks, why not.

Of course it benefits them but not us customers. Today economy in the US is largely based on finance sector, not manufacturing where profit rather than to reinvest itself into expansion of economy, it rather pockets a few rich people.

2wire gateway for U-Verse is a consumer product. Therefore of course it is crappy. But its adequate for average needs. But I find it better than 2wire gateway for ADSL At&t sells. I never had one but my roomate used it and oh wow, I could not believe how short it was in capabilities to linksys wrt54g v8.

2wire (now Pace) makes some really good advanced products. Although at&t does not support them.

»www.pace.com/universal/gateways/···-series/

reply to etaadmin
etaadmin: again you come across as a huge AT&T hater, don't know if you even realize this. Wildly exaggerated statements and accusations of lies and conspiracies (i.e. that AT&T is providing its investors and the public false information -- HIGHLY unlikely for a huge, closely followed, public corporation) really just make me not want to even engage with you.

I mean, I provide specific points about how AT&T can expand and improve FTTN and upgrade to FTTP and you just repeat "uverse is basically dead and has no room to deliver the future" when I just told you the roadmap.

The link you gave to the light reading story is just talking about EPoC, which is not fiber, and about CCAP, which is the standard for the equipment they'd install in their nodes (headends) to support FTTP. It also says nothing like "cable is better positioned to support FTTH than telco" as you assert.

Well, guess what, AT&T's road forward to fiber is exactly similar to the CCAP story. Leverage their hybrid network (fiber already going to the area), put new cards in their node, lay last mile fiber, and you're done.

The difference is that AT&T is actually closer than cable to that extension. Why? (a) Their nodes are closer to the home and their fiber net to the nodes extends further outwards than cable's HFC. So they have less infrastructure to put in place. (b) AT&T already has an all-fiber FTTP service up and running, which cable does not, so they already have all the provisioning, billing, gateway in the home, and support for that service. Cable will have to do all that over again. (c) AT&T already is running IP to the settop with video/audio/Internet over IP, so they are well positioned to deliver advanced services, and exploit their IP backbone. Cable has none of these.

Look, it's a given that coax has a much higher potential bandwidth to the home than twisted pair copper. That is not in dispute. But you gotta look at things realistically and not from a hater POV.

You've at least backed down from "the router is a nightmare" to "the router is a nightmare FOR ME" which is a much more reasonable position, and I agree with you, if you try to make it do what it's not designed to do, you will not have a good experience. It's not a "matter of opinion", there are facts involved.