madmax988's profile

Scholar

 • 

404 Messages

Tuesday, September 14th, 2021 3:23 PM

What is the most recent DVR year of manufacture anyone has? anything more recent than 2015?

I have to swap my DVR yet again, and I'm tired of AT&T trying to pawn off "refurbished" but really just used and not at all refurbished ancient DVRs on me, that will inevitably fail as soon as they get any use.  At&t has previously sent me 12 and 11 year old DVRs with original hard drive, as if I should record my tv and trust they won't fail, what a joke. 

My current DVR is an ISB7500 manufactured in 2014 (that still has the original hard drive). That I got 2 years ago.  It replaced a 2015 IPH8005 that was new when I got it.  

So I'm curious has AT&T even purchased any DVRs since 2015?  or is 2015 the best I can hope for when my replacements come.

I don't mind refurb if it comes with a new hard drive.  

Employee

 • 

34K Messages

3 years ago

uverse is a dead horse and no longer manufacturing new units they are refurbishing any replacement equipment  and are hoping to phase it out altogether, already they are not allowing new customers or installs, the only customers are grandfathered accounts which will slowly dwindle and uverse will become extinct 

Scholar

 • 

404 Messages

3 years ago

@Constructive While that is all 100% true that doesn't answer my question.

Uverse is still my best option at this point(although if they can't fix my issues I'll be forced to take a different option)

Att tv/directtv stream is a garbage product for many reason,, I've used it.

A directtv satellite dish is going to have outages due to hurricanes and frequent thunderstorms in my area.

Comcast is probably 2nd best option but I'd lose a couple channels I watch and pay significantly more for internet and tv.  

So I ask again for current uverse tv customers what year did att stop buying new dvrs? Or does anyone have a refurbished one that actually has had its hard drive replaced?  (You can see date code and/or manufacture date of hard drive by flipping dvr over and using a flashlight.   

Employee

 • 

34K Messages

3 years ago

2015 i believe is the newest  

Scholar

 • 

404 Messages

3 years ago

I mean expected 10+ year old hard drives is just wishful thinking /cheapness on att part. Nobody makes 10 year hard drive warranties for a reason. 5 years should be the maximum for sending a harddrive back out.  I mean last time I have in and took a 2014 but it only lasted 2 years and then I lose basically a years worth of TV.  And its like oh great I paid for nothing.  

Is that unreasonable as a customer to expect not to have equipment sent out that is for sure going to fail 90% of the time?

Scholar

 • 

404 Messages

3 years ago

I mean they hard drives themselves didn't need to be purchased at the same time they are just generic dvr drives.  For instance in my isb7500 it's a 500gb Seagate pipeline 2 (the lower memory buffer version of course because att only buys the cheapest lowest bidder parts).  Which is also why the boxes use insane amounts of powe (20-30watts? Vs. A fire tv that can perform everything better for under 5 watts?  

Scholar

 • 

404 Messages

3 years ago

The problem is uverse is still more advanced in almost all areas (other than cloud dvr) than att tv/direct tv stream.  My list of reasons for hating it is long...:it's a clunky interface, it changes channels/streams, extremely slow, it doesn't allow you to manually adjust or even check on series recordings so often it misses episodes and doesn't record correctly, you can't add time to recordings,  you get fricken ads while paused,  it doesn't have all my local channels, it has that ridiculous 90 day/30 episode limit on recordings, etc...

I guess maybe directtv  is the premium product at this point, but I'm still not 100% convinced a satellite can deal with storms in Florida.

Comcast is probably a better option at this point than uverse, but it's definitely more expensive, especially when you have 4 tvs and if you want a decent amount of either cloud and/or local dvr storage, and internet will also cost me more since the minimum I could get on comcast is 400mbps plan just to get a measly 10mbps upload speed to match my 50/10mbps att speeds. 

Scholar

 • 

404 Messages

3 years ago

@my thoughts That's a pretty thorough model list.  I've had almost every piece of equipment on that list at one time or another.  

I refuse to accept any gray boxes, it's ridiculous that those things are still in circulation, but they definitely are.  They don't even have enough ram to properly run the current u-verse OS, so they hang constantly, check the system info and you'll see it's always at 99% used.

You are only missing the cisco isb7500 dvr, which is what I have now.  The pace iph8005 is definitely superior to it, in heat and noise.  (if I had known how bad the replacements were going to be I would have kept my brand new iph8005 when its hard drive wore out and tried replacing the drive myself, especially since it's basically user replaceable anyways.  

I have a isb7000 in 1 room, it took forever to get it replaced with anything other than a gray box.  What's annoying is at one point before stupid wireless boxes I had 3 of them and had to return them for the wireless boxes, when the system update suddenly decided that coax no longer worked at my house lol.  

Every tech who sees the isb7000 is like, yea I've never seen one.  

I've never had the motorola  2262 or 2250 because for a long time my area was cisco only, before they started mixing.  How do they compare to the others?

I've never understood the difference between the iph8010 and iph8110.  But there must be some small difference.  Since I can't get fiber I'll probably never find out.

I wonder if I complained long enough and/or bribed the tech enough if they could get me one lol.  

It makes sense that the gateways would still be new, since they are still selling internet plans, and I doubt the gateways can be refurbished all that much once they break, since they are basically just 1 board.  Although were you sure it was actually manufactured that date? or was it refurbished and slapped with a new sticker? They love to slap new "manufactured" dates on the boxes before they ship equipment.  

lol At one point I could not figure out for the life of me why I had some weird extra device (3 wireless stbs)on my network connecting through the wireless stb AP.  And finally figured out that one of my wireless stb's for some odd reason reports 2 mac addresses/IP, the original one that's labeled on the outside of the box and a different one that matches the system info for the actual network card that att must have refurbished into it.  

Scholar

 • 

404 Messages

3 years ago

@Juniper Yea I was very close to switching to directtv years ago at Costco when the rep was offering me an insane deal with all the equipment for 4 tvs free and all the activation fees and monthly receiver fees waived and everything....but I said I'd think about it and drove to the Directtv store and they told me there was zero chance they'd honor any of that, and that in reality my price would end up almost double.  I knew it was sketch, when I tried to take a picture of the term sheet the rep at costco showed me and he claimed it was proprietary and I couldn't photograph it lol.  

So on direcctv the DVR works even if the satellite is down?  because uverse sure doesn't let you watch a second of anything if the connection is down lol.  

Employee

 • 

34K Messages

3 years ago

When I was an installer Cisco were they only boxes in my area. When I went on loan to another area they were Motorola. I was pleasantly surprised at how fast Motorola provisioned and how fast they went through the setup and menus. A 4 box install with Motorola saved me almost an hour on each install

Scholar

 • 

404 Messages

3 years ago

By directv store I meant an att corporate store that sold directv.  Lol the second T gets added by autocorrect most the time.  And don't get me started on having to use a & for at&t everytime, such a pain.  

Hmm interesting about Motorola the only Motorola I've had is some vip2500 wireless boxes and they seemed fine.  I only ran into issues when one of the vip2500 died and my ven 401 got replaced with a 2500 and 1 Cisco wireless box and the system did not work with that combination.  A ven 501 and moving the wap an absurd amount closer finally solved that problem. 

With having lost millions of uverse tv customers you would think the warehouses would be packed full of decent refurbs at this point.  But maybe nobody ever bothered to sort the good equipment from the bad equipment.   

Some things have never made any sense to me about uverse system.  Like why can att overnight a box but sometimes it takes 3 days before the activation window opens to be allowed to activate it.  Isn't it literally just typing a serial number into the account? 

Community Support

 • 

254.4K Messages

3 years ago

We are here to help get your DVR back up and running, @.

 

Thank you to all the aces for the useful information.

 

Just to clarify, Can you let us know what is exactly going on with your DVR?

 

Why do you need the replacement?

 

Let us know more information so that we can better assist you.

 

Marc, AT&T Community Specialist

Employee

 • 

34K Messages

3 years ago

oh gosh this was 12 years ago i think (cant be sure its been 12 years) they were VIP1200 at the time, first gen Motorola boxes if i recall and sometimes i get confused but the gateways were pace 


NEED HELP?