We now have Comcast triple play and our service is one hundred times better than AT&T. 20 years ago AT&T couldn’t make a simple switch from two bonded ISDN channels to DSL — everything was out for a couple weeks. Then phone was out about ten days because none of their “highly trained techs” could find the point at which a squirrel had chewed through my pair of wires. DSL was never reliable, and in our last days, it would regularly drop from 1.5 Mbps to 150 kbps. They had zero interest in fixing their old plant and simply wouldn’t respond to our pleas for help. To top it all off, after we switched to Comcast, we told AT&T to take their wires off our property and they said they couldn’t do that because we were no longer a customer! I pointed out that, if I were still a current customer, I wouldn’t want my wires removed. So I ripped their damn plant out myself and, to this day, their coiled-up wire is dangling on the pole behind our house. WORST company ever.
By comparison, we are very happy w Comcast except for their infernal price hikes.
Wife had our former Indiana Bell-Ameritech-SBC-AT&T number for around 40 years and when AT&T could do no more for us than continued 6.0 mbps for $51 a month and bare bones phone for $30 more, we ditched the phone altogether and went with Xfinity Performance 25 mbps for $19 plus $8 for the wireless gateway for a year then regular price $29.99 a month. AT&T made a half-hearted effort to keep us when we called to terminate service, including lying that for $19.99 all we would be getting is the same speed they provided. As if we wouldn’t have already had the Xfinity installed and speed tested before we called them.
“To top it all off, after we switched to Comcast, we told AT&T to take their wires off our property and they said they couldn’t do that because we were no longer a customer! I pointed out that, if I were still a current customer, I wouldn’t want my wires removed. So I ripped their damn plant out myself and, to this day, their coiled-up wire is dangling on the pole behind our house. WORST company ever.”
I hate AT&T with a passion, but Comcast is actually worse. When we switched to DirecTV we (like you) asked Comcast to remove their drop wire. Got the same answer. So I pulled all their OSP from the house and pulled the drop across the street and wrapped it around the pole.
We have AT&T cell phone service (Verison is crap here) but at home the AT&T service suddenly went bad so I checked the cell tower locations and found that there were three nearby and one was only 1,000 ft away. They had changed it’s direction to give better service to another area and they admitted it. So I bought a Wilson repeater which fixed the problem. Now I get a letter from Wilson stating that I have to have AT&T’s “permission” to operate my “ local cell tower.” I hope AT&T understands the words “fat chance.”