a good friend of mine works for AT&T, in the department that's rolling out the uverse product

and things are going horribly

they're on their 4th set top box, and about to replace it with the 5th

the servers that provide authentication to the set top box can only handle about 30,000 users per server, and as of yet they've been unable to make more than 1 server work. They're nearly at 30,000 users now.

this makes me sad as I'm counting on AT&T to allow me to leave E*. TWC is not an option while they continue to use the awful SA-8300 boxes. And I'm not paying a few hundred $$ to switch to D* (which I'd need to in order to get the latest HD-DVR).

using cisco and alcatel network gear...

High level representatives from Microsoft, Cisco, and Alcatel all made at&t sign an agreement stating that at&t understood that none of the vendors were of the opinion that this product was ready to leave the lab and go into full production.

Not sure what the details are on the "readiness" stuff... may be a particular part of the way they're provisioning it.

I know AT&T is trying to do it all over copper which may be part of the problem.

and they're not doing it all over copper... they're doing a copper last mile

When was the last CO all copper? Last mile is where you have 90% of your transmission problems usually anyways.

UVerse has always seemed to me as a project trying to compete with FiOS the cheapest way possible so I'm not surprised they are having problems.