oh, and ...

I got totally fed up with ATT and their intermittant DSL connection. 15
emails, 4 hours of phone frustration, and the new urdu version of att tech
support couldn't help or resolve the frequent crappage.
Some of the support people didn't even undertand the word "authenticate" or
get the meaning thereof.
Let alone, chap and pap...
and stuff they should know. Can you say "line condition" Billy?
Anyway, I had Comcast install one of their little black boxes today and got
a nosebleed watching the bandwidth meter soar over 8 Mb.
Now if I could just find something on the internet worth downloading.
Too bad about SBC, when they bought ATT, the price of 1.5 mb went from 19.95
to 34.95, and then the service itself went from OK to crap to non-existent.
I got the feeling that none of the service reps I spoke with gave a rat's
booger either. Like" Oh, we are sorry that you are experiencing this
difficulty but we are unable to confirm any problem with your current
service or setup.
Really? Then how come I can't even get a dam ip address , for pete's sake?

Anyone else notice things getting bad with ATT dsl?

Jim

 

My line is 15000' from the SO, right at the end of DSL availability.
There's some kind of line noise at the carrier frequency for the
bandwidth I'm paying for, so they have to use a higher carrier
frequency. This results in higher bandwidth. For a while, someone would
see that and set it down again, resulting in no service. So I called
them up and asked, "Does your computer system have a note field for each
customer account?" The "UhhŠ" response meant, "Yes, but you're not
supposed to know about that. How did you know about that?" So I made the
tech explain in the note field what's going on. No problems from this
source since.

Wohoooo! How far is your house form the SO?

When I got my DSL service, my cousin in .de was paying the same number
of DM for his service as I was paying USD for mine ... and was getting
higher bandwidth. The US has fallen far, far behind what the rest of the
civilized world has.

I get mine through Sonic, a geek-friendly ISP. When I set up my service,
they asked me what kind of computer I would set up with it. I said, "An
OpenBSD firewall with some Macs, Linux servers, and one or two Windoze
boxes." The reply was, "Oh, cool. We'll get you set up." A non-geek
friend told them he had a Mac, so the sales guy walked him through the
setup procedure on the phone.

That's sonic.net. Tell 'em I sent ya.

 

Jim:

Eggs-zackly! Went from rock-solid-for-a-year-at-a-time with
PacBell and SBC, to dead-in-the-water-two-days-every-two-weeks
under AT&T.

PacBell's and SBC's "secret sauce" was resetting the DSLAMs every
night at midnight. That caused a minor disruption if I was in the
middle of a download, but my router could easily reconnect by itself
after a few minutes. AT&T will deny it up, down, and sideways, but
every time I called them to fix my line and they ran a test which
reset the DSLAM, I got my connection back immediately. They blamed
my old reliable big-as-a-brick Alcatel 1000 modem and made me buy a
new small-as-a-deck-of-cards Siemens modem, but that did not fix
their DSLAM problem.

After a couple of months of crap service, in spite of very polite
Hindi and Urdu fellas trying to help me from 13,000 miles away,
I gave up and went with the Comcast "Triple Play". I now have
completely dead phone lines with no AT&T connection whatsoever.

The Comcast VoIP phone service is crystal clear, no toll charges
to anywhere in the US, and the same international rates as AT&T.
With AT&T, I used to get trunk busy signals and recordings
telling me to try again later when calling my Mom in Fort Smith,
Arkansas, or Manila, Philippines, on busy holidays. With Comcast,
I can punch right through to Arkansas or the Philippines any time
I want, and it sounds like they're next door.

The data connection is about three times faster download and at
least twice as fast upload. The upload speed is important for
my business.

The dual-tuner DVR lets me record one channel and watch another,
and I have full HDTV service. AT&T only offers one channel at
a time with their internet TV service, if they can make their
high-speed DSL work in your neighborhood. Hah! They can't
make their low-speed DSL work in my neighborhood.

Oh, and when I have a question and I call Comcast customer
service, I get this really intelligent sounding young lady
who could only have been born and raised in the good old
U S of A. Maybe, even, like, California, ya know?
What a relief!

I predict that AT&T will go down in flames unless they invest
in Fiber-to-the-Premises. That's the only way they can beat
the cable companies.

Regards:

Mike Nelson
http://michaeltnelson.com

 

Same here. I was an early DSL adopter back in 2000, switching over from
company paid ISDN to self-paid pacbell DSL. I was a loyal customer for many
years. In 2005, my DSL service went to the dogs. I had an outage every day
at the same time, and had huge performance issues. After way too muc time on
the phone with phone service, and enduring the dysfunctional mode of 2
tiered support (someone in India talks to you, but no one can do anything
about your line until the loca service gusy working the local 9-5 shift go
to work the next day) I quit every AT&T service. I have Comcast, which has
never had a single outage in over a year, and use Vonage for my phones.
Works like a charm and yeah, has saved me money month to month.

 

I got SBC DSL when I got a phone line for my shop. It worked about
half the time. Sometimes it would go off and I'd reboot the box and
everything was fine, sometimes I couldn't get it back until the next
day. All in all it worked about half the time.

Tech support was at least in the US. A nice woman in Oklahoma helped
me reinstall the software. After that she didn't know what to do.
Nobody could help me. I'd signed up for a year and cancelled about 9
mos. early, expecting to have to refuse to pay the early cancellation
penalty, but they never even put it on the bill.

 

I guess it is a "YMMV" situation. I have two 6Mbps DSL connections at
home (Speakeasy, Sonic...Covad and AT&T respectively). Both are rock
solid. Not even a hiccup, and both circuits are monitored six ways from
Sunday. (I have servers; Comcast is useless to me.)

And I'm supposed to be an "AT&T-hater"!

 

Cheaper and faster, is what I'm noticing...

Was paying $39 for 3.0M service, was going to upgrade to 6.0M for $35,
but I'm too far from the CO, so have to stick with the 3M, but the
price has gone down to $25.

You won't see me complaining - I''ve had the current setup for ~7
years with maybe 2 outages that I noticed in this time. If only
electricity in Boulder Creek was as reliable as the DSL is.

YMMV indeed...

 

Interesting, they have been "high diming" (car guy term for sleazy
price manipulation) ever since ATT married SBC. AS I said the QOS went
down proportionately.

I hate to pay more, but I need reliable for telecommuting stuff. If I
can't access the network mgmt tools for my job , it can mean getting
dressed and actually going to where things are. How antiquated!
Jim

 

It's been pretty good here. I'm kind of fed up with AT&T's attitude,
but the DSL product is the one thing I've few complaints on. When it
does break, "customer service" more closely resembles what bulls do to
cows, but it rarely breaks, at least for me, and I've been with them
since PacBell first offered the service.

I've gotten a notice purportedly from them that my special rate was
about to expire, and if I wanted to negotiate a deal with them, I should
follow the link in the email. Thunderbird warned me that the link was
not as displayed, and went to Prodigy.net. I'm wondering if this is a
phishing expedition.

I don't know if Cox in San Diego is better or worse than AT&T, but the
thought of telling AT&T where they can put their phone is very tempting.

Rich

 

Their latest surprise, after "volunteering" our personal info to the
NSA, is that they are going to put ads in our perwona l emails. That
just about does it for me, besides the fact that I can't even get the
dam spam in the first place.
One nice side effect will be that it will take about 3 weeks fo rmy
new email address to be copied to all the spam bots across the world.
I might only get 600 or so a day, then it will catch up to the normal
amount, which I measure in weight, not messages.
Jim

 

My one experience with ATT was a "high speed" wireless connection three
years ago. Service was intermittent at best. I once spend 6 HOURS one
Saturday morning, trying to find someone to help me out. Nobody knew
anything, once I managed to contact a live person. I got transfered to
at least a dozen offices. In the course of this session, I decided to
can the service. The whole thing started over again as I sought someone
who could terminate it. "Wireless? You mean, a cell phone?"
"No! Internet service!" "Sorry, I'll have to transfer you."

I finally remembered the name of the PROGRAM, "feet on the street."
I finally found someone who knew something about it, who was able to
help me terminate the service.

They still owe me $130 for the box I turned in. I hate ATT more than
anything. I wouldn't buy their service if they were the last source of
high speed access on the planet!

--
Barb
Chaplain, ARSCC (wdne)

"Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to
have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous,
ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can
produce."

--Molly Ivins

 

I've had very few problems with Cox. Their website features a status
page, where if something isn't working, they tell you what, where, and
when it will be fixed.

--
Barb
Chaplain, ARSCC (wdne)

"Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to
have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous,
ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can
produce."

--Molly Ivins

 

Who is? ATT? or Cox. Cuz I am so not down with that!

--
Barb
Chaplain, ARSCC (wdne)

"Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to
have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous,
ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can
produce."

--Molly Ivins

 

Sounds promising. Thanks, Barbz.

 

jim
i heard from the inside that the merger went badly, things didn't mesh
right. first my dsl bill almost doubled, then a part of my bill - that
didn't even show up on my paper bill - started appearing on my credit
card charges (with no explanation). and i'd never, ever given them that
card number!
anyway, after a good three hours on the phone they got my billing
straightened out and got me into a new dsl contract (25/mo for 3Mbps)
with the first month free. works fine, but i'm in pretty close to the CO.
helpfull hints:
those people in india are very nice, but they're only as good as the
script they're given. escalate, escalate, escalate.. till you're
talking to someone in the usa who can DO something.

don't let them give you another 800 # to call. you'll hve to sit
through the phone menu all over again. make them stay on the line and
transfer you till you're talking to another human being.

 

I dunno but I could bring my fluke home and check it out.
But I might need to climb the pole to get an accurate reading from my mpoe
to the so.
Jim