It’s getting pretty clear that the support chain at AT&T U-Verse has already begun its disappointing, but expected decay. We are now three days in a row that maintenance technicians were supposed to come to my house, but haven’t. This was a simple wiring repair, and it has turned into half a work week of downtime.

This is affecting my bottom line. It’s not okay.

I called into dispatch this afternoon, and I have been hung up on three times in a row. The phone rings through to someone, and then just cuts off. I don’t know if it’s their phone system, or if they’re just acustomed to my caller ID number. I suspect the former, since I’ve tried on two different phones.

After that, I called the last premise tech (thankfully, he left his card), and he’s calling around to try and get to the bottom of why this is getting so screwed up.

Developing… very, very slowly.

Update (9:40 PM): A lot actually started happening around 5 PM. Two maintenance technicians came out, and got to work. I got a call from Robert (one of the premise techs, and the first person I called after I couldn’t get dispatch to answer). Major praise to him for rescuing the job. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, and got the trucks rolling again.

They found the signal between my house and the VRAD was fine, albeit with some crosstalk. But, rather than just leave, they got on their phones and kept calling… until they found another premise tech to come out. I now have three big AT&T trucks on my street at this point.

Ultimately, they decided to replace the Remote Gateway (that’s the modem and router combo box). That did fix the bad fit issue which Tier 2 Tech Support… but the connection was still bouncing arround. Every speed test either had the download rate screwed up, or the upload rate. That’s consistent with the issues that I’m having, as the connection runs fine climbing up to 18 mbps, then gets knocked down, only to start climbing back up again.

After I thought the maintenance techs had left (giving up really, none of us could come up with something else to try), they knocked on my door. They decided that since there was some crosstalk on the line, that replacing some of the line would indeed make sense… even though the diagnostics were coming back clear.

So, they’ll be back tomorrow to do that. If that doesn’t work, we’ll move on to replacing the line that AT&T hijacked from U-Verse (the feed indoors). If that fails… I’ll be packing stuff up to move to Silicon Valley at that point, so I really don’t care. Hopefully U-Verse will work better at my new home.