What the heck is U-verse? AT&T doesn't make it easy to find out.

I've been planning an upgrade of the TV set-up in my house, and have started to research the options. It is almost a full-time job.

On the hardware side, the options are pretty straight forward -- HD or not, 720 or 1080, LCD (cheaper) or LED (much more expensive).

But on the content side -- that's another story. And not just which channels to get -- it's how to get them. You can get free TV (digital signal only), all sorts of cable packages, all sorts of satellite packages, and even TV from the phone company. If you have AT&T phone service, then the phone company's offering is called U-verse.

But what, exactly, is U-verse?

I was intrigued by U-verse and so decided to research it to see if it was right for us. First, I went into an AT&T store in the neighborhood. Bad idea. Take a number, have a seat, and wait your turn to have a sales rep (who's handling everything from iPhone to Blackberry to U-verse) talk to you. OK, I'll call AT&T and surf the web.

At this point, I still didn't know what U-verse was. With the other options, it's pretty obvious -- it's in the name. But U-verse is some made up corporate brand, and it's not like there's a generic category that's obvious.

Finally, when I reached a rep on the phone, I got the basics: it's a fiber-optic signal that comes to a box in your house and then that box distributes the signal wirelessly to boxes attached to your TVs, using Internet Protocol, or IP.

Wow -- wireless IPTV. Very modern.

But I wondered -- how's the signal? How's the picture? How do people like it?

Again, it was a research project. It took a few attempts at phrasing my question to Google before typing in "quality of U-verse service" and getting some answers. The basic answer: it's OK, not great. And it's complicated to set up.

So there you have the answer to "what the heck is U-verse?" But my questions for AT&T are just starting: such as, why isn't it obvious in your materials how the technology works? How come I can't see a demo of a typical installation? Why haven't you attempted to allay my concerns about how a wireless signal is going to travel around my two-story house? (I'm not the only target customer who lives in one, you know)

So I decided to write a blog post about this because this is not as much a technology problem as a marketing communications problem.

Bottom line: I'm probably going to stay away from U-verse because of these unanswered questions and stick with a better understood alternative, either cable or satellite.