Dave and I can tell you about uVerse. We love it. You can also access your email through the tv, see your latest photos that you uploaded. We had seen it at its experimental test state, and were drooling at the possibilities. Speak with Dave further about this. He can tell you about the specifics.

My day job is testing the equipment both Comcast and AT&T use to put video into your set top box. AT&T's current bandwidth is not sufficient to carry an HD signal to your home, unless your home has a fiber connection to AT&T. Comcast has some issues with HD as well, but they are mostly blips caused at the source (transmission interruptions from sports venues).

AT&T is faking out the bandwidth issue with buffering and MPEG-4 streams, but IMHO it's not ready for prime time, unless you're on a gigabit network. Minimum bit rate for decent HD is 4.5 Mbps, which I don't think DSL can maintain yet. Cable has plenty to spare, and 16 Mbps is not out of reach on coax.

But as with all things video, seeing is believing. My understanding is U-verse is still in alpha test, and only a handful of "friendly" homes in the Bay Area has it. And that's crucial, because it's a much better delivery system than DSL.

VoIP doesn't take much bandwidth, and I have AT&T's digital voicemail for my cell phone and land line, and it's excellent. It even emails me .wav files of my messages which are good quality.

That's pretty much the whole point of U-Verse - having the bandwidth to get true 1080p (or at least 1080i) HD quality. At which point you're paying more to AT&T than you get for the same quality from Comcast.

I don't know. Dave might. Even when I was on the U-Verse project at Microsoft, we didn't have an actual U-verse connection - both there and at Motorola now, we replicate the best-case network with our internal gigabit fiber (now 10 GB, actually).

As Spring said, we have u-verse and have been very happy with it. There will be a VoIP option at some time (u-verse voice), but it is not available in California yet.

There was an article in last July's Home Entertainment magazine comparing u-verse with Time Warner cable: http://www.hemagazine.com/node/U-verse_versus_Cable. It was published before AT&T raised the available Internet download speed to 18 Mbps.

As for the bandwidth caps, my understanding is that they are separate; the tv signal and the Internet signal use different frequencies along the copper wiring from the neighborhood node to your home.

We had been using Dish Network satellite prior to u-verse becoming availalbe, so I can't compare it with Comcast. With Dish, we were able to record two shows simultaneously, although we could not watch a third show while the two were recording. U-verse limits you to two simultaneous HD shows, whether viewing or recording. Like Dish Network, you can watch recorded programs on any TV in the house, although you can only set up recording from the main u-verse box or through the Internet.

Our download speed averages 2.9 Mbps for the 3 Mbps we're paying for (the DSL Pro level, although it may be worth raising this to the 6 Mbps for the extra $5 per month) and our upload speed exceeds the advertised limit by quite a bit.

Hope this helps,
Dave

Well, I checked and learned that u-verse voice is being rolled out in California (we employees are always the last to know), but is not yet available in all areas u-verse is available (which means they have not added the required central office equipment). I cannont check on voice availability at your home; I'm told you would have to start the order process to check on that.

Dave