Thinking about going with ATT Uverse now that it is available in my area. Is anyone using it now and if you switched after alreay having your MSS going with copper, did you have any issues switching to the ATT/2wire optic modem and switch? Everything is working great now and don't know if I might be making a mistake changing over to fiberoptic. Thanks for any advise or input anyone might have.

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neil

One of the last things I did prior to leaving HP was to fly to San Antonia to provide on-site support for an AT&T exec while he set up the MSS in his home. He showed me the IPTV solution, it was pretty cool though still in development. He did have a 2wire modem, I'm not sure if it was fiber but I would bet it is. The only issue we had (and it was a good thing I was there to help) was getting remote access configured. The 2wire router did not support UPnP so we had to manually forward the ports, and as I recall the config GUI was a bit confusing. I think he had 20mbit down/2mbit up, pretty darn fast!

I hope this helps...

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Alex Kuretz
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Thanks Yakuza for the quick reply. I know that the last 2wire I had when I got my machine didn't have UPnP and I went with a netgear gateway and router because I never could get port forwarding to work on the 2wire. I also see that none of the fiber gateway routers listed on the 2wire site have gigabit either. Guess I'll have to ponder on it and decide if I want to fight the 2wire problems again. Got pretty frustrated with my last 2wire.

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neil

ATT uverse is NOT fiber to the house. (maybe there is fiber to the house in some super super rare occasions).

As a whole Att runs fiber to the neighborhood(or pole/curb) and then uses a varient of dsl from the fiber hub to the home. (or in some cases fiber to the pole/curb and then a flavor or 10 ethernet into the house.)

Verizon goes fiber right up to the door with their FIOS THe other phone company execs (eg ATT) have essentially said that verizon is stupid and idiotic to go fiber to the premisis. They say it is a waste of money.

So if you live in a rebuilt area it's probably not fiber to your house. Perhaps a new subdivision would have fiber to the house?

Problem is that verizon's fiber to the house can do 50 down, 10 up, carrry hundreds of concurrent HD channels, provide VOIP, and IPTV (for vod and ppv) all at the same time without breaking a sweat. There is plenty of room to spare.

Att on the otherhand has dsl speeds (great dsl speeds since the fiber is so close by) and can therefore ONLY FEED 2 HD channels to a house at one time. So if you have 3 HD sets then you are crap out of luck if you want HD on all 3. I dont know about their dvr but same thing would happen- if it is recording 2 HD channels then dont expect to watch HD on any other channel at the same time. If HD is big to you (or you plan on getting HD before your contract would run out) then that's a big issue and likely not to be reolved anytime soon- as DSL (even butt kick DSL like they are giving) just can't fit piles of HD down the pipe like cable or verizon's fios can. (maybe they can do 3 down the pipe now or soon with advances in MPEG4 conpression, but you wont get basically all the HD a human could want like you will on the other services)

So long and the short of it- you'll still probably would have copper to your house and the 2wire router they give you is probably just a fancy dsl modem/router.

Thanks michaelk, you are probably right as they are advertizing the "pro" package as 3 down and 1 up and their "max" as 10 down and 1.5 up. Nothing like Verizon has. I don't have any HD TVs right now but am thinking about replacing my big screen with one. The deal breaker is probably going to be the 2wire which caused me to loose what little hair I had left when I got my MSS. Wonder if my netgear gateway/router would still work with the Uverse? Thanks for enlighting me on the differences. Man, there's a lot of knowledge on this site.

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neil

Fiber to the node, then VDSL to the house.

If you put the 2wire in bridge mode (they call it dmzplus, its in the firewall section), you can then use any router you want behind it, but if you are using ethernet to the tv STB's you should leave them in the 2wire switch.

Thanks Frumple, the receivers for the TV's are wireless with this system and ATT advises I have to use the 2wire but they are working with other mfgrs so something else usable may come down the road. I decided to go ahead and order it up and they are supposed to install on the 21st, Will post after it's installed to let everyone know how it works. Thanks everyone for your help. Any one else with info they think I could use, keep posting. Thanks again.

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neil

if you wouldnt mind please post back what your experience is.

besides the interent, I'm also interested to hear about this wireless tv they have.

be happy to do so.

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neil

OK, here is the latest on getting U-Verse installed. First off, it is confirmed that the U-verse fiber optics come to a node some where and then it's regular telephone wire after that. My node is 4 blocks away but the signal is very strong according to the install tech. The gate way is gigantic and weighs a ton. And for michaelk, the TV receivers are NOT wireless. Just goes to show you that thier sales people either don't know anything or will tell you anything to make the sale. The receivers hook to cables, and in fact they use the existing cables that Comcast put in. Now on to the 2Wire gateway. Once again yakusa knew what he was talking about. The user interface is the pits and port forwarding just wouldn't work. After spending about an hour on the phone today with U-verse techs, we finally just put the MSS in the DMZplus mode (which opens all the ports ) and my server is now accessable from the net. TV picture quality is sharper than Dish and I am happy with that. So all in all, not quite what I had hoped but not totally dissatisfied with the change over.

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neil

Thanks for sharing your update! I don't think we had to put the MSS into the DMZ when I installed it, if I can find screenshots of the GUI I can probably remember how I got it working, I'll post back if I can figure it out.

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
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Thanks Alex, it's not going as smooth as I thought. I have discovered that putting the MSS in DMZ has removed it from the home net work. Can't connect no way no how (connecter or remote). A call to U-verse tech level two produced no joy! They haven't a clue why this is and their only answer was to go back to ADSL. So right now I have a choice of being able to connect with in the network or having access thru the net, but not both. I knew having to deal with a 2Wire gateway was going to cause me grief.

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neil

I am no expert- but what if you hooked up a 'normal' router to the 2wire gateway (i assume you have one you were using prior?)- and then set the router's WAN IP as the one in the DMZ. But the MSS and all your other machines downstream of the router. Then all the ports would go to the router and it would block what it normally would and forward what you want/need. You would have the routers firewall and nat to protect you.

edit- after posted saw Frunple said same thing way back when...

neil, does this help at all? It seems to ring a bell to me as to how I got the customers configured...
http://support.2wire.com/?page=view&article=21

edit: Another thought, how are you testing to determine if it works or not? You won't be able to tell from inside the home or from the WHS test pages, instead you'll need to test from outside your home. I did this by navigating to the Webshare page of my customer's MSS on my PocketPC phone. A friend should be able to tell, or if you can VPN into your office and connect that way it should also work.

_________________
Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

Sorry it took so long to get back to you Yakusa and michaelk, had a death in the family Wed. eve and have been tied up with family things. Things are looking up, I got a Netgear 8 port gigabit switch (provided at no extra charge by the install tech) when they installed the U-verse. I had already tried the portforwarding (80, 443, and 4125) but that didn't work) The MSS and my vista machine we plugged into the 2Wire and every thing else in the switch. I put every thing into the switch, took the MSS out of DMZ and redid the ports. A notice came on my monitor saying that a router behind the router was detected and asked if I wanted to resolve the issue or continue with this set up. I didn't really have a clue of which I wanted but kept the router behind the router set up and now the MSS can be found on the net. I still get a notice that port forwarding has failed but all seems to be working fine. And yakusa, you are right that I can not access my site over the net from within the network as I could with the Netgear router I had with DSL. Is there an explanation for that or should I just be happy everything seems to be working now ? Thanks for all the help you guys, I really appreciate it.

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neil