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Xfinity vs DirectTV vs Uverse


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We have Uverse. 

If they have the fiber available in your neighborhood, the internet connection is great, but if you're limited to the ADSL, not so much.

  • They'll terminate the fiber into your house in an ONT, which needs to be powered (it's just a tiny little power supply, but you do need to locate it where there is power available). And if you're trying to have your Internet connection backed up on a UPS, it will need to be part of that.  An ethernet cable runs from the ONT to the Uverse gateway.

We like the guide/tv just fine, but that's probably because we're used to it.  I think, generally, people believe DirecTV has a better picture.

Integrating Uverse with C4 is not quite as simple as I would have hoped:

  • Control of the boxes is IR only.  IR control of our DVR works flawlessly, but the other boxes miss channel/page up and down commands occasionally.  Our dealer tinkered with the IR blaster settings in the driver and got it about as good as we could, but you might find it annoying.  It doesn't bother us too much.
  • You have to use Uverse's gateway, and there's no true passthrough mode.  If you want a better router to run your network, you're going to have to either run double NAT or put your router in the DMZ and send all incoming traffic to it (what we did).
  • The set top boxes are IPTV boxes and basically join your network (either over Ethernet cable or coax).
    • The biggest problem with them is the way they multicast (if you connect them over ethernet) - if you just stick them in your switch, they're going to destroy your network performance.  The Uverse gateway has the handling for that built in, so you're going to want to plug those directly into it (or into their own switch that is plugged into the gateway, I guess).
      • If you're running double NAT or DMZ mode, that puts the boxes outside of your LAN.  That hasn't really been a problem for us.

 

Essentially, our setup had to be this:

ONT ---> Uverse Gateway ---> Router in DMZ ---> LAN, with the set top boxes plugged into the Uverse Gateway outside of the router.

Overall, we like it fine, but it's certainly not the most convenient setup to configure.

We may not be doing it the best way, so if anyone else wants to say we're making it too complicated, I won't be offended. 😄

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34 minutes ago, Dr. Venkman said:

ONT ---> Uverse Gateway ---> Router in DMZ ---> LAN, with the set top boxes plugged into the Uverse Gateway outside of the router.

Wow - you can't run their gateway in bridge mode?  That sucks.

If it's anything like their non-fiber Uverse gateways (Arris BGW210), you can somewhat put them in bridge mode by enabling "IP Passthru" mode and specifying the MAC address of your router's interface.  I just did this a few days ago.  The public IP (WAN) get's passed directly to your router.

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I think it's roughly the same thing, but our gateway (Arris 5268) calls it DMZPlus.  All incoming traffic (any protocol, any port) is forwarded to the router, and the router does get the public IP.  

But the uverse gateway is still running its own network, and the set top boxes are on that network.  I believe I was told once that if you only have internet, you can put the gateway in a true bridge mode (or maybe eliminate their gateway altogether in favor of a modem only), but with the IPTV boxes needing the gateway, you can't.

It's not so bad, it's just a little annoying.

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  • 2 weeks later...

No reason to not use xfinity, to use their wireless boxes i dont think you can put the modem/router in bridge mode which is a bit of a pain since you will have to put more effort into port forwarding due to double nat so I would go wired if possible. Plus you need to rely on the comcast modem/router for its wifi for the wireless boxes which also kinda sucks

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On 12/24/2018 at 6:58 AM, sonic30101 said:

No reason to not use xfinity, to use their wireless boxes i dont think you can put the modem/router in bridge mode which is a bit of a pain since you will have to put more effort into port forwarding due to double nat so I would go wired if possible. Plus you need to rely on the comcast modem/router for its wifi for the wireless boxes which also kinda sucks

Works just fine in bridge mode with Unifi gateway and access points ;)

Just hope you don't have to work with Comcast customer service. It sucks as bad as people says it does. 

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