re: U-Verse vs Cox Internet

Notice the varying stories. You have had a shitty experience with Cox. Others have had a shitty experience with U-Verse. It varies by location and how much bullshite the customer is willing to tolerate. I've been in the same house for 6 years and have experience with both companies with both internet and TV, and I can pretty objectively conclude that U-Verse offers more for the money with TV, and cox offers more for the money with internet.

In experiencing service from both companies, I got exactly the service that was advertised. Why? Because I am what these companies would call an insufferable customer. I understand precisely what performance I should be getting and why I wouldn't necessarily be getting that performance. I do not let the installers/techs leave until it's running properly, and that includes getting the advertised speed in a speed test within a 10% margin of error.

I had to make cox run all new coax from the service node to my yard, all the way through my attic and to my modem (and I bought my own modem rather than use Cox's terrible residential gateways, which I suspect contributes to some customers' problems). I also made them update my modem with the latest firmware.

For U-Verse, I understood that the service is fiber-to-the-node in my area. After that, it uses existing copper lines to the homes, which are fed from the VRAD and require iNIDs with pair bonding depending on your distance from the VRAD. My house is older, so I made them thoroughly test the line to my house as well as the existing copper wiring in my house (which would be my responsibility to repair if it was shoddy), fix any bridge-taps or bury a new line. Because it uses your existing old-school copper, line quality is of the utmost importance. If you're moving to a new development, this should not be an issue. One thing to consider is that uverse uses an interleaved path buffer that adds 20-30ms of latency between your iNID and the VRAD.

If you have the knowledge and patience to make sure everything is set up as it should (and it almost always involves getting in touch with a higher tier technician), a majority of service issues will be limited to the hardware in the home -- bad or improperly configured modems and routers, poor client adapter performance/reception, etc.

So, let's assume that both Internet services are working at your house as they should. Here are the pros and cons. Note that some of these pros apply only to my experience/area based on having full service and speeds as advertised:

U-Verse Internet Pros
- Bundled with U-Verse TV service (which you already indicated you will get), the 24mbps would be about $8-10 cheaper than cox's 25 mbps

- In the two years I had U-verse, I only experienced one outage, which lasted 2 hours. I'm talking 24/7 reliability, because I am generally running one program or another overnight that will clearly indicate a lapse in service if it happens.
- Never needed a VPN to pirate things on public trackers because ATT never sent me any warnings

Cons
- Highly reliant on your existing copper to your house and within it. Can be problematic in older houses.
- Unless you live in one the texas cities where u-verse giga-plus is offered, speeds packages are only available up to 24 or 45 mbps, and if you are more than 2000 ft from the VRAD, you're stuck with 18mbps or less.
- Very low upload speed, like 1.5-3mbps
- High latency compared to traditional cable, which can be a problem if are a competitive gamer.
- AT&T swears they don't throttle Youtube, but I and thousands of others had issues with youtube buffering. And watching HD youtube vids was nearly impossible. Last I read, ATT silently "fixed" the issue, but it's something to be aware of.
- Can't bring your own modem. You have to use their shitty residential gateway. You can still add your own router to the gateway, but you have to make sure you use the gateway to put the router in DMZ-plus mode (it might be different/more user friendly in newer gateways). The gateway U-verse provided to me only had 802.11g, when N had been pretty standard for a while already.

The Cons of U-verse essentially translate to the Pros of Cox Internet:
- Faster speeds available
- Much higher upload speeds
- Lower latency
- No issues with buffering HD videos
- You don't have to use their gateways. You can buy your own modem if it's on their approved list.

Cox Cons for me:
- Raises prices a little more often than ATT, but it's easy to get your bill lowered by simply asking to cancel so that you can switch to U-Verse. Nothing makes their assholes pucker quite as much as the existence of any competition whatsoever.
- Had to start using a VPN for my piracy
- Reliability not as strong. Every now and then there's a "maintenance outage," and occasionally I have days where I have to reset the modem every couple of hours -- obviously some service issues on their end. Certainly not so many that I want to cancel.

These days, I'm using Cox Internet and U-Verse TV.