2010 March » dennisjudd.com

*disclosure: I work for AT&T, but do not work for Uverse. My opinions are my personal ones*

While everything was going on with my web server being migrated (and me changing from Movable Type to WordPress) we had Uverse installed on 1/25. It has now been over a month since then so I feel I can finally go into detail on how everything has worked out.

So first thing’s first….I needed to figure out how the wiring would be done to get TV to all the rooms that need it. To do that the way I wanted I’d need to get some cable from the basement to the attic. My original plans were something like this:

I managed to get two cat 5′s and two RG-6 cables run all the way from the attic to the basement over the course of a few months. I tell you what if I ever build my own house I’ll make sure there is a cable conduit run between the two. It would have made things a lot easier. Anyways back to the Uverse.

My goal was to use cat5 for all the Set Top Boxes (STB’s) to avoid any HPNA issues since I knew the RG-59 in the existing walls was pretty much garbage. So once the tech arrived I showed him the mounting place in the basement (next to the existing alarm panel) and explained we could use the cat 5 I ran previously to get into the attic where we could drop down to the office and master bedroom. He agreed to use the cable and actually came up with a better idea…instead of putting a switch in the attic (yes I know it was a bad idea to begin with) why not just run one to the master bedroom and the other to the office.

My original goal had been to keep the STB traffic seperate from the LAN but this idea was better than mine so that’s what we did. Beyond the time it took to terminate the wires, punch down blocks, etc I think it took me longest just to rewire the entertainment center downstairs due to all the baby gates.

Here’s what the RG looked like:

I know it looks close to the water heater but there’s no heat transfer. The home run from the NI was brand new cat5 taht we installed as was the run to the STB in the family room (there were holes to a wall plate I had previously drilled for a phone line for the DISH DVR). Which brings me to the wall plates…they have these really neat ones that are branded as Suttle plates that have a RG45, RG11 and a coax connector on them. The really interesting part is they are larger than normal wall plates by like an 1/8′ of an inch…which I assume is meant to hide any wall damage from removing old plates. They’re pretty darn slick honestly:

Since I’m using coax to backfeed a video source to our TV’s the plates worked out really nice. In fact every wall plate we installed has cat5 and coax running out of them. The only place this was an issue really was in the master bedroom were we couldn’t get both cat5 and RG6 through the fire break in the wall but we were able to squeeze cat5 and RG59 through….don’t ask me how but we did it. Since it was a vaulted ceiling I wasn’t going to be able to really play with it much so I was just happy to get cat5 and a coax through it.

So getting every wired up was arduous but not really hard. The service is great but we did have a rocky road in the beginning that was resolved after a couple of RG swaps and then finally a port swap in the VRAD (RG’s would lock up green but remain unpingable). The telephone and internet seem to work just fine (in fact it’s faster than my DSL since I was so far out) even though we are about 2950 from the VRAD. Our stats actually have been good enough to upgrade to the 25/2 from our current 19/2 profile but I wanted to make sure we were stable before making any changes.

Once final thing to note is power consumption. Our old Dish 522 used to pull a constant 32 watts and towards the end started to sound like a jet taking off. The new Uverse DVR seems to pull 16 watts (although I saw it drop to 11 watts once so it might have a sleep mode) and the STB’s seem to pull 10 watts.

dennisjudd.com

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