Posted on 12/20/2015 10:53:36 AM PST by Dallas59
ATT forced me to get it last week or cut off my service completely. The installer said the drop outs will be more frequent and that has already been the case. The fiber only goes to the hub about 2 miles down the road, so the copper lines to everyone’s house is still the bottleneck it has always been, but now we can enjoy the drop outs.
Well sure. There is no competition anymore. We let corporations get WAY too large.
“AT&T have been conning people for years.”
Then, increasing their billings about 15% year to equal doubling in less than 6 years without improving service and allowing their outdated land lines, switch boxes to become over run with more connections than they can handle.
My wife and I had two separate phone lines in our home. Phone service got so miserable that we couldn’t call each other besides seldom having problems getting our phones to work to dial or receive outside phone calls. (More on that later)
When schools were out for holidays and those kids joined their college bros and sisters at home on their parents, DSL slowed down even more or stopped working on the whole cul de sac . Somehow slow down filters on our dsl lines in the boxes appeared to make them even slower. We found out about this later.
Our tv satellite company kept increasing its monthly bill while adding more non English channels and cancelling channels we watched. The satellite tv monthly bill and the AT&T bill were over a hundred $’s each and going up with miserable service.
So we went to Comcast for the phones, internet and tv. For about the same $’s as the AT&T phone and the satellite. The Comcast installer found out the line to her phone over 2 decades had basically broken, which cause the problems of our phones not working. He also took off the filter to the DSL connection in the box and gave it to us. The 120$ bill for the package started increasing as noted above.
A couple of years later, our no nonsense contractor disconnected the old AT&T outside box while the Comcast guy was here. At first the Comcast guy said we couldn’t have a phone line. Our 6’5” 250# contractor told him to fix it with a cable to our phones and stop the bs. He did with small box on our outside walls, and the phones have worked great since them.
A year later, we were having our house repainted and other work. Our contractor saw that Comcast had used the old satellite cable to my office, our old tv set and their little new phone box. He got another Comcast guy out and with no argument got new cable from the utility pole by the street to our house, our tv, their little phone box and the internet and phone line to my office.
After that cable service guy left. Our contractor disconnected the so called ground cable from our smart PGE meter from our Comcast cable and grounded the smart meter properly in the ground.
Each year, Comcast and I have a battle re our package until I get the price reduced below their increase. It is still lower than the AT&T combined satellite, phone and lousy service
bill.
Everything works very well including a new smart tv and computers on line and wifi.
I live in a different berg outside of Richmond, VA and our only choice is Comcast. We used to have VZ DSL but was at the outer limits and barely worked. No AT&T and no FIOS and none expected. Decent service with Comcast as long as you don’t have a problem and it is expensive.
AT&T switched from GSM to CDMA, and his lifetime card was useless.
When it comes to residential communications it’s not the one you like, it’s the one you hate least.
I'm pretty housebound, especially this time of year - But I just got rid of all that last spring. Paying for the landline (it's a business phone) and broadband internet... about $70 bucks a month - and stream anything I want to my TV from the internet for free. I'll never go back. What I have now is way better, and I haven't seen a commercial in months... And $100 stays in my pocket every month.
https://fiber.google.com/newcities/
All of the Internet providers are stuck with a tremendous amount of legacy infrastructure, whether their forefathers were phone companies or cable TV.
I was selling dark fiber 20 years ago, and most of it is still laying in the ground doing nothing.
When Google fiber moved into Austin, suddenly AT&T doubled everyones’ Internet speed “for no charge”.
Just more marketing bloviating.
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