Ordered U-Verse

Well, my wife has either gotten tired of my complaining about our Internet connection, or she herself is tired of our poor connection. She decided that we could order AT&T's U-Verse as my Christmas present. I read a pretty good explanation about it here. However I managed to pull it off, I'm very eager to get it installed.

I see it as a present to the entire family. All five of us use the internet daily with plenty of squabbling over access to the computers we have. I also consider myself a more advanced user of the Internet. I maintain several permanent VPN connections to other places, and occasionally need to VPN into work. We watch some streaming video and the kids play quite a few online games. I do bit-torrent on occasion to download VMWare images or Linux distros. I also maintain a few applications that have web interfaces that I can access remotely. Add in wireless, sub-netting of my home network and other networking fun. Our current Internet rarely goes faster than 300-400 kbps, so the promised 6 mb connection will be real nice, even if we don't see a full rate.

We are transferring our home phone service into the plan. I thought there might be some interesting features that come along with it, but it sounds like we are essentially getting the same service, except flat rate with unlimited long distance. While we don't do a lot with our cell phones, we at least have a back up should problems arise.

Finally, we are getting a decent package of video chanels. We've had DirecTV, which I understand is a better service, but we don't currently have a real HD TV (only does 720p on component connections), so figure that is should be as good as what we are used to watching. Our set top box in the play room broke, and we haven't wanted to pay for the repair, so this move should also restore TV access in the playroom. The DVR seems cool too. We'll be able to record 4 channels and watch the recordings in either the family room or the play room. That would be good, since our youngest son monopolizes the family room TV with Cartoon network (and fairly poor choices of cartoons at that).

I need to read up a bit more and figure out how I should connect up some of my existing equipment. I figure the VPN stuff will be a bit tricky. Not sure when it will be installed yet, but I'll keep you posted. I'll be heading over to the U-verse web site to see if I can get a status update on my order.