Med-Psych.com

While AT&T U-verse has been good in some ways, we're still having various problems.

1. Call waiting caller ID doesn't work on many cordless phones. Ultimately, I was able to find out that the Uniden 6.0 DECT phones seem to work well. It was important for me to have caller ID working when someone called with call waiting as I'm frequently receive work calls from home. I like to know when it is a work call coming in as opposed to friends. With the Uniden phones, all seems to be working just fine now. Unfortunately, I don't particularly like the interface on the Uniden phones. I have some older Panasonic 2.4gz phones that also seem to work, but those phones don't have a speakerphone base with caller ID built in. The newer Panasonic 6.0 DECT phones I had don't work with the call waiting caller ID.

2. Several of our friends' phone numbers show up as "Private Caller" when calling our U-verse number. We have spoken to them several times about this and they definitely do NOT screen out their phone number. We also have verification in that when they call our cell phones to test things, the name and number shows up just fine. It's only when calling the U-verse number that we have problems. We have spoken to AT&T about this one several times and the only explanation we get is that this is a "known problem" and they are working on it. We first raised this issue 2 months ago, so they are obviously slow with getting this fixed, if they are really trying to fix it. I'm much more in favor of "known solutions" rather than "known problems".

Here's an update 6 months later. It turns out the Caller ID problems are still there. Some phones don't show Caller ID for call waiting. We pretty much only use the newer phones which do work fine.

We still have problems with a few of our friends showing up on our phone as "Private Caller" even though they don't have privacy set on their phone. Interestingly, in the last few weeks we now have Caller ID showing up on our TV screen, and for these "Private Callers" it shows their phone number, but just doesn't have the caller's name. At least we now know the private callers when we're watching TV! It'd be nice if they'd actually fix the problem though.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with AT&T Uverse. The big pluses are being able to watch DVR shows on any TV in the house, being able to record TV shows online (so can recover them while away), and in the end, I like that they provide a wireless router as part of the package. I'd always had my own wireless routers and it's nice not having to worry about replacing my own when it goes out. This router actually has a pretty strong signal. As I don't have any wireless-N cards, it also doesn't matter that it is a wireless-G router.

I'll let everyone know once they fix the "Private Caller" issues. At this time, the fact that Caller ID for Call waiting isn't working is not an issue as we've replaced our phones with ones that work with AT&T.