U-Verse TV Sucks. Here's Why

I never got around to doing a full review of U-Verse, but some recent events have caused me to revisit this; I feel compelled to warn others about this service.

Some Background

You can read the full article to get the full context of this; I have the U-Verse Gigabit service not by choice, but because my condo forced it on me.

Some things you need to know:

U-Verse is not real TV

Traditional TV has dedicated bandwidth; that coax that runs into your house (or from your dish) broadcasts every channel continuously through your cable. So when you connect there's no delay; there's nothing to load. It's just there. Real TV doesn't skip; it's not delayed. It's just there. U-Verse is something different.

U-Verse is actually streaming video; U-verse is more like Netflix than TV. The set top box is actually running Windows CE, and TV is streamed using an IPTV stream. The only difference between U-Verse and watching streaming TV over the internet is that U-verse has a dedicated network, so there's more control over the bandwidth. Generally the streaming works fine, even with 3 TVs going at once. One major annoyance, however, is that you're actually watching on delay. Not a long delay, but if you have 2 TVs on the same channel they won't be in sync, which can be highly annoying. When I'm cooking, I'll have the same channel on in the living room as my office, and when I run back and forth the TVs are out of sync.

By Default, Wireless is used

The installers installed the equipment as wireless, which worked fine for 2 years. In my case, there's a gateway modem

Update 2/21/17

AT&T to Phase Out the U-Verse Brand

It seems they've been bleeding subscribers as their customers flee for better services, and many switch to DirectV. Yet somehow the LOG Board is telling us that the reviews were better for U-VERSE?

The truth is that there's a transition underway and it hasn't been conveyed to us exactly how it is going to affect us. AT&T's plan is to somehow integrate it's high speed broadband and DirectV, so in a few years there will be a different product.

It's EXACTLY the reason I outlined in this article that the smart thing to do right now is to do nothing and wait to see how things hash out. In 2 years, the world will be different and the choices will be different. Locking into 7 years now is the wrong thing to do.

The Original Post

On Friday I got an email telling me that AT&T will start to run fiber in my building on Monday, and that they'd need access to our "Smart Panel'. Uh Oh, I thought. What have they done now? Sending an email to the property manager on Friday afternoon is virtually guaranteed not to be answered until Monday, so I tracked her down and asked what was going on. She informed me that John D'Angelo and his disciples had voted to dump Comcast and switch the TV and internet service in the building to AT&T U-verse.

If you live in the Las Olas Grand, you'll want to read this. Or if you live in a condo with a cable TV package you should read it as well.

For the record, the "Board" is well aware of my expertise in internet services; nobody asked my opinion about anything regarding this $2M commitment.

Some Background

We've had a bad TV contract for 10 years that expires in August, and our Board somehow sees this as an opportunity to spend more of our money. The TV "contract" really serves no purpose; we get some discounts but we actually end up paying more because we're not eligible for some of the bundles and deals we could get without a contract. So an expiring contract is a weight off of the Condo; an opportunity to get out of an expensive contract. But the Las Olas Grand isn't interested in passing back any savings to residents; they assessed us to pay for some valve gizmo that was supposed to save us money on electricity, but when the savings kicked in none of the savings was passed back in the form of lower common charges; they just folded the money into grills or Spas or new pool furniture. So the idea of giving me my $45 saved from the contract to buy what I want isn't an option that's going to be considered.

The Las Olas Grand is like a bad government, where residents will pay about 2% more every year no matter what savings measures are put in place. There has never been a decrease in monthly charges, and the reserve is hopelessly underfunded.

Resident owners also have no input into how our money is spent; there has never been an association vote for any expenditure; our only remedy is to impeach the board with 107 votes; which is the main reason why there is no practical method of communication available between owners. No active website (the last post on the Condo website is 4/2/2008), No message board. No Committees. Nothing that would allow us to express our collective disgust with how the building is being managed. It's a Harvard Law School case study for a Bad Condo.

As for this situation, for months there were fleeting mentions that they were investigating bringing fiber into the building; as if there was some urgency to do so; but no indication that they were going to make us pay a massive amount for a TV package which would make keeping our current Comcast TV service financially stupid. Residents were never informed (or asked for opinions) about potentially switching our TV and internet services, because that's the way really bad condos operate. This is the only mention of a TV contract we received:

No mention that AT&T would be making a presentation or that they had planned in advance to materially change our TV service contract. They regularly rubber stamp contract renewals at board meetings, so there was no reason to believe that anything important was going on here. Note that they also moved the meetings to 6pm to make them less convenient for residents to attend. It's actually painful to go to meetings, because it's so obvious to me that they're a sham and that all decisions are made behind closed doors beforehand.

Older minutes mention that they were investigating bringing fiber into the building, but there was never any mention of forcing us to pay 3x as much for a max TV bundle. The issue here is that this is unnecessarily disruptive; changing your TV service is a hassle. We have email addresses and equipment. I'll have to lose 100 hours of taped stuff that I haven't had time to watch yet. And for what? So I can get Starz and Encore? I'm still watching House of Cards. I have to watch Bloodline and Orange is the New Black. I've never once wished that I had any of the "new" channels we'll be getting with U-verse.

The "Fiber" Fallacy

Our building currently has 2 Coax feeds into each unit, one of which carries our Comcast TV and internet; the other is unused. Coax is perfectly fine for the foreseeable future, maybe forever. All Broadcast TV channels are sent down simultaneously, so it has massive bandwidth capability. "Fiber is good, Coax is bad" is the line of a salesman trying to sell you something you don't need. The reason that Comcast only offers 100Mb/s is that almost nobody needs more than that; not that the coax can't handle it. So "re-wiring" a building with fiber sounds really edgy but it's really just a way to convince those who know nothing to spend a lot of money. Heck, the InsideFortLauderdale server is only on a 100Mb/s feed, why would I need more than that at home?

Coax has a capacity of about 5-6Gb/s, so we currently have 10Gb/s into each unit. "Fiber to the premises" is silly marketing talk; we've had coax to the premises for 40 years. The advantages of Fiber:

1) 40-100Gb/s instead of 5-6Gb/s (not needed)
2) Longer Distances (not needed)
3) Much thinner, so many more fibers fit into a "jacket" (not applicable)

There is no "quality" factor in this case. AT&T was trying to sell their 18Mb/s as "higher quality" than 100Mb/s coax because it was fiber, which is just hogwash. It's a flat-out lie.

Instead of using in-house expertise, the LOG board hired a "consulting" firm to help them make this decision. Of course consulting firms are usually in the pockets of the vendors; they make a business of selling expensive services to the old farts who control the coffers at most condos. I wonder if the consulting firm explained the fallacies about Fiber to them?

The Deal

7 years. Gigabit Fiber into each Unit. 470 Channels, 4 DVR boxes. (Cost is outlined below). You can see the proposal from the minutes at the end of this article.

The Blunder: Skinny Bundles are The Future

The problem with this "deal' is that they did exactly the wrong thing; the right thing is to consider TV and Internet as separate entities; the separation of these services is the future.

Anyone who doesn't have their head in the sand knows that all of the chatter in the cable industry is the break-up of the Big Bundle. The days of cable companies forcing people to buy 300 channels they don't want are coming to an end. So-called skinny bundles are Coming Soon. Choice is coming, possibly within 2 years.

The cable companies finally have some competition; after 30 years we finally have leverage over the hated monopolies; services like HULU and SLING are starting to negotiate with networks to create so-called 'skinny bundles'; less expensive services that allow viewers to purchase just the channels they want. Others like Apple or Amazon may get in on the game as well, creating many choices in the near future. Imagine a world where you just pay for the channels you want to watch? Disney stock has been hammered over speculation that ESPN isn't worth nearly as much if people aren't forced to pay for it in a cable bundle. Cable companies are starting to position themselves as internet service providers as the day where homeowners will purchase streaming content in lieu of traditional TV is on the horizon.

With all of this exciting stuff on the brink of becoming reality; why would a condo board lock residents into a 7 year contract that forces them to buy just about every channel in existence?

The Cost

Another fun thing about D'Angelo's board is the misrepresentation of the cost and benefits of their proposals.

Board Misrepresenting the Cost of the Services

According to the minutes, D'Angelo misrepresented the cost to residents substantially. He stated that the current cost per unit is $32, which is patently wrong. First, since the cable contract is part of common charges, different units pay different amounts depending on the size of the unit, so there is no one price that we pay. He also states that the new cost will be $93 per unit, which obviously also can't be the case.

Our current contract was $96,439. last year, which translates to the following costs per month. The new cost is based on "assuming" that the new contract is 2.9x the cost of the current contract (based on 93/32). The $93 figure could be just as faulty, but I assume that the overall proportion is correct.

$32 is also well below the average cost per unit of $37.03 ($96,439/217). So the proposal to commit about $2M in association funds doesn't represent the actual cost per unit of any actual resident. Is it possible that nobody bothered to check the math on a $2M proposal? Or are they purposely trying to deceive residents?

It's impossible that someone on the board doesn't know that common charge allocations are proportional. This is just a dishonest document.

The Problem with AT&T U-Verse

Another issue I see is that AT&T U-verse is widely perceived as the worst of the major TV providers. DirectV is god-like, Comcast is 'meh', and U-Verse is 'No Thanks'. Do you know anyone who loves their U-verse? Perhaps those assessments are unfair or wrong, but I don't think it's a selling point to tell prospective buyers that the building has AT&T U-Verse TV. I suggested 10 years ago that we investigate getting DirectV into the building, because having the CHOICE of comcast or DirectV would be a huge win for the building.

AT&T is also notorious for under-delivering and for misrepresenting their offerings. I was a data network engineer at New York Telephone when DSL was first being deployed and the way AT&T marketed that was totally dishonest.

AT&T agreed to fiber deployment as a condition of their acquisition of DirectV, so there's some suspicion that they're not totally committed to it. Or that they care about how well it works. The worst possible nightmare is that the service doesn't work as advertised, and we have 7 years of AT&T trucks parked downstairs. There's always risk when you make a big change.

The Best Solution

The best solution that a condo can do for the Future is to have high speed internet options for residents but no TV contract at all. Why does a condo need a TV contract? Just let people buy what they want. In a couple of years everything will be streaming, and we'll be able to pick and choose what we want to watch. I don't need a bunch of stooges on a condo board deciding what I want to buy.

Its also completely inappropriate to have an expensive TV contract as part of common charges. The disparity in the cost distribution shown above illustrates the unfairness; TV programming is not a "common charge"; why should people in larger units subsidize TV and internet for smaller units?

What D'Angelo and his board did was completely backwards. They had an opportunity to simply drop the contract and let us buy the service we want (or keep what we have) without disrupting the entire building. Moving forward, we'd have the flexibility to drop comcast and buy our TV streams from whoever had the best product. This is what happens when you have a board with an agenda rather than a board that does what's in the best interests of the community.

The idea here that they had to do SOMETHING was intuitively wrong. What they did was force all residents, even part time residents, to pay for high end services 12 months of the year whether they want the services or not, without even attempting to determine what services residents do want.

My belief is that the board voted for a new amenity that they believe will increase the value of the building using our money, without our consent. And the decision was made well in advance of any public mention.

The D'Angelo Factor

As everyone in Fort Lauderdale knows, RE Broker D'Angelo makes a bundle in commissions selling units in the LOG, so adding expensive amenities works to his personal benefit more than anyone else's. The higher the prices, the higher the commissions. The budget shows that this super-amenity was planned well in advance; note that a significant increase was planned for the TV contract.

Here's the problem. Since board members aren't allowed to meet and discuss things like TV contracts in private, how did they know 6 months in advance that they were going to massively increase the TV contract? In order to get this increase into the budget, there would have to have been concurrence among board members outside of the Sunshine of the Association. There was never any public debate about whether or not we needed or wanted to bring fiber into the building as far as I can tell; no discussion about whether 100Mb/s was good enough; whether residents were so unhappy with our current 40Mb/s that we need a big change. No discussion about how inconvenient it would be to have to switch from Comcast to something else. You know, the kind of discussions that a functional Condo would have about such a large expenditure. What they did was the equivalent of giving a choice between a Mercedes and a Lamborghini, and then choosing the Mercedes because it was less expensive and got better gas milage.

Secret plans that force residents to pay for new amentities without input from or the approval of the residents.

Something I learned

In checking out the proposal, I noticed that it says our current contract with Comcast includes Showtime. Really? I was 100% sure that I was paying extra for Showtime and as suspected, Comcast wasn't giving me Showtime. It was Saturday at this point so I couldn't get any info from the condo, so I called Comcast. Low and Behold, "Oh yes, you're supposed to get that for free".

Comcast is Evil

I didn't have Showtime the first 9 years I lived here, so I've only been paying for it for about 8 months. I asked for a credit. Initially, they said that they couldn't verify that the contract included Showtime before June 1st and that I'd have to go to a service center with a copy of the Association contract. That wasn't going to happen. Finally I got to a supervisor, who told me that they could only give me 90 days of credit. All cable and phone companies have a bogus "90 day rule", which claims that it's up to you to report errors on your bill within 90 days. AT&T tried to pull that on me when I lost my iphone and I discovered years of being charged NY State taxes; they ended up having their legal department offer me a full settlement on my termination fee if I agreed not to sue them. The 90 day rule is Bullshit.

I Propose we Investigate Suing Comcast

I see this as a breach of contract. It's up to Comcast to know what the contract is; the game of overcharging people hoping that residents don't know the details of a condo association contract won't fly in front of a judge or jury. If I'm the only one who was paying for Showtime or who didn't know we were supposed to get it, then too bad for me. I'm out $50. But I suspect that a lot of residents are affected.

Some Math:

Let's suppose that 1/2 of the people in the building have been paying for Showtime for 10 years.

$10 x 12 x 10 years x 107 units = $128,400

if everyone in the building was paying for Showtime, the overcharge number goes to $256K.

There's also the case to be made that people who don't have showtime all have been deprived of a paid-for benefit because of negligence by Comcast. If the number approaches $100K, there could be a nice settlement for the association. Comcast can't pocket overcharges because of an arbitrary TOS clause. I'd hope to at least see the association poll residents to get an idea of how large a deal this might be.

Conclusion

I'm paying for a lot of extra stuff (2 DVRs) so unless AT&T totally screws us (a possibility), this will probably work out for me in the short run. On the other hand, I'm perfectly happy getting 40Mb/s, and I know how things work well enough to know that "gigabit" isn't going to be much better. I don't have "buffering" issues now, and when I do it's usually not Comcast's fault. But the 7 year contract locking us into 100s of unwanted channels is a huge mistake in the long run, and by forcing us into a Big Bundle TV contract, it isn't feasible for us to opt to keep our current Comcast service, because we'd essentially be paying double for it.

From a governance standpoint, it's simply the wrong thing to do. It increases our already too high monthly maintenance, it forces residents to pay for things they might not want, and forces part-time residents to pay for high end services 12 months a year. It serves John D'Angelo's apparent agenda to build a luxury condo, but doesn't serve the interests of the residents as a whole.

What should have happened is that we should have been given more choices; the choice to keep Comcast, the choice to OPT for faster internet, and the choice to buy skinny bundles in the future. Those choices have been taken way by John D'Angelo and his board.

Las Olas Grand TV Proposal

(From the Minutes)