Time Warner - San Diego.   Alias Roadrunner.   Alias Slime Mourner.   This cable company goes by a number of names, but the game is the same:  pretty high speed Internet service.  Extensive TV content.   Decent digital phone service.  Embarassingly bad customer service.  Ridiculously high prices and low value.

Just for comparison purposes, consider the neighboring cable company,  Cox Communications.   Cox offers four Internet packages ranging from  $21 per month (for 1.5mps) to $58 per month (for a blazing 30mps).   In between, is a particularly well priced 12.5 mps offering for $31 per month.    Time Warner's internet service -- you've got just one option at $52 per month.   Yikes!  Oh, and they charge extra if you want a wireless router added to that.    But since Cox and Time Warner don't compete,  Time Warner is free to charge those high prices for its mediocre broadband service that comes with its vaunted lousy customer service.

Enter AT&T U-verse.   I was grateful for it because, at a minimum, it kept Time Warner's prices from being that much higher.  So thank you AT&T.   I ordered it within the first month that it came to San Diego back in 2006.   Sadly, it didn't go well.  They were effectively still alpha testing at that point and the slow speeds, poor equipment and complex installation was simply no match for cable service.  Within a few months, I tired of the glitches and canceled the service.    Back,  I went grudgingly, to Time Warner.

But I wasn't going to STAY with Time Warner.  Oh no.   A few price increases transpired and by early 2009, I figured AT&T had worked out the kinks and was ready to go head to head with Time Warner.   I jumped ship back to U-verse in March 2009.

They still had their very friendly and dilgent installer team - most all of them have been nice and accommodating folk.  They had upgraded their equipment and the installation went smoothly.  The savings was about 10-15% over Time Warner's prices with some extra perks, such as whole-house DVR capabilities and a wireless router built into the price.   So far so good.

Then it got bad.  The DVRs starting failing.  In 9 months, I went through three of them.  The gateway (AT&T's verse of the cable modem) failed after 7 months and also had to be replaced.   The wireless router is oddly unreliable.   Sometimes it doesn't work and then mysteriously fixes itself.   The repair process is a bit infuriating.  Even the technie guy that came out to replace one of the broken DVR boxes was pulling his hair out dealing with the level 2 tech support (based somewhere in India) that made the service repair guy go through contortions before concluding -- as we had done one hour earlier -- that the gateway had gone bad.   Ugh!  Then the gotcha:  AT&T's promotional offer ended and they jacked my monthly rate up by $15!  I'd had enough.

So is AT&T Uverse the white knight coming to the rescue of distressed Time Warner customers?  Not really.  They are giving it a moderately effective try but the clunky equipment and complex technology is occasionally headache inducing.    While I'd contemplated switching back to the Roadrunner Dark Side, I've not actually made that humiliating crawl back.   Instead,  I came up with an alternate strategy.

Let's just keep this between you and I, right now.  As this is sort of an experiment.  Here it is:  I'll be increasing the U-verse speed up to 12 mps (appx. $45 per month).  Then I'll cancel all of the TV service.  I've begun using Magic Jack for my phone service.  (connected to a cordless phone network, and I've now got phones in most of the rooms in my house).   Then with a Warpia PC USB to TV wireless adapter ($99),  I'm able to send the Internet directly to my TV.  Click here to read about my Internet instead of Cable options.    Goodye overpriced cable channels.  Hello Hulu, Comedy Central, CNN, You Tube and any other web-based content provider.   So broadband service combined with extensive web-based content seems like a better deal than $120-150 per month to Slime Mourner. 

Stay tuned.  I'll let you know how this particular strategy plays out.