One thing to consider is where you live in relation to
the u-verse POP or Point of Presence. The POP is where they feed
the signal in to the pair of wires that ultimately comes to your
house.

	The way u-verse and DSL in general works is that the
high-speed data are sent as RF carriers on your telephone pair
and they begin to die away the farther you are from the POP. We
never had u-verse but we did use DSL mostly successfully between
about the year 2000 and January of 2014. We turned out to be
right on the edge of coverage and the fellow who enstalled our
DSL couldn't get the modem to work at first.  He had to cut our
pair of wires at the pole. I'll explain.

	When phone wires are strung, everybody on that street
has a pair in a bundle and the telephone company usually lets
the rest of the wire after your house down to the end of the run
stay intact so if your house is the first on the run, all your
neighbors pairs go by your house and the last neighbor on your
block actually has your telephone pair live on the pole but not
connected to anything.

	For voice, this has no effect except to act as a very
small capacitive load on your line.

	At DSL frequencies, this load is much greater and can
snuff out a marginal signal so the extra step of cutting your
pair after it passes your house removes this load and DSL then
may work. Besides, if you had a neighbor who wanted to tap your
pair, he couldn't do it from his house but that is hardly ever
an issue.

	We now get internet, telephone and cable TV from
Suddenlink and it works fantastically so far but I know other
Suddenlink customers in this town who get very poor service and
love u-verse for internet.

	It all depends on your infrastructure and the competence
of the technicians who do the installation.

	One thing I thought of when we made our switch last year
is that u-verse is simply upgraded DSL delivered over a copper
pair. It is probably near the top of it's game and won't get
much better simply due to how it works.

	Coax cable, when in good condition and installed
correctly has a much higher band-width and most likely has more
potential for high-speed data.

	This business about loosing your internet if you have
this or that connected to cable is simply bogus as long as the
connections are properly made. Internet is simply a bank of
television channels that are used for data instead of digital TV
which is just data containing television signals instead of
internet data. Your internet modem which, on suddenlink anyway,
also has the VOIP telephone interface, transmits back to the
cable system on one or more television channels and can gang
them together to get higher band-width.

	I am sorry this message has dragged on a bit but
information helps us all make the best choices and while this is
not directly amateur radio, it is close and much of what you
already may know does apply to making cable work for you as well
as it can.

	One last thing. Many cable systems including Suddenlink
have fiber optic networks that may not go to your house yet but
your coax cable probably goes to a node near your house where it
meets fiber to handle both video and internet signals.

Martin


Steve writes:
> The iPhone app is fairly useable, but the interface to their guide is =
> clunky. =20
> I do like the way they have channels organized a lot better though, not =
> haphazardly as with my cable company.