We switched in January mostly to upgrade our internet from what we had before. We use to have DirecTV and a cable modem w/speeds of roughly 3 mbps. Uverse was promising 12 mbps, but we're getting nothing close to that. Our speeds are often only 1 mbps or worse. It's so bad that we're already looking for alternatives (both DH and I work out of the home so the higher capacity is a must for us).
This was us, too, with the Internet service. Long story short, we had DSL through SNET which eventually became AT&T. We now need greater speed but we aren't eligible for the faster DSL products because we aren't close enough to the "central office." We wanted to stay with AT&T because we are attached to our email addresses.
When Uverse became available, I arranged to have it connected. We struggled with very, very slow speeds and frequent disconnects for over two months and had many, many site visits and a router swap (don't get me started on how they MUST send an "inside guy" after each phone call if the "inside guy" who previously visited didn't himself schedule a visit by the "outside guy" when it is needed). Eventually, a dedicated wire was run from the street pole to a dedicated jack in the house for the router. In addition, some type of change was made to ports at the office, and a "tap" (whatever that is) was removed from the lines somewhere along the street poles. The tech said they were able to reduce the virtual number of feet the data traveled through some of these steps, which did seem to help the speed.
After all of this work, we are finally seeing speeds in the 10 Mg range for service that is advertised as "up to 12," and we've only dropped once in the last 3 weeks. One of the many techs told us that we will likely never see higher speeds and we won't be able to go to the faster packages because we are at the very edge of how many feet away we can be from their equipment. The Sales department, of course, doesn't tell you this.
I likely will never switch over our phone and TV to Uverse, but the Internet service should now serve us well enough, I hope, for our browsing and to watch occasional movies when I finally get the TV set up for that.
Best of luck with your decision.
