I don't have U-Verse but I'm thinking you should be able to switch their equipment to a 'pass through/bridge' mode to where it should just act like a modem at which point it should just pass traffic ...
Whenever we use our computers, there are times where the DNS doesn't seem to be working. It happens on our Mac and PC (Windows 7) machines. I've moved from AT&T DNS to OpenDNS and still the problems ...