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Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 5:42 pm
by nick danger
I've had SBC, now ATT DSL for a little over a year, and have been generally satisfied with the service. I usually have download speeds in the 700 kbs range, which is great coming from the dialup I had previously. I've had very few outages-- the one major exception being when they hooked up my neighbors' service and the tech disconnected mine in the process. Took them three days to reconnect me, and after weeks of badgering them, the gave me a $1.50 credit for the down time.

But a word of warning. Your cheap deal is probably only a year long. When that year expires, without a hint of any kind of notice, they will double your rate. Mine went from just under $50 a month to nearly $100.

After another round of badgering, they finally gave me a month-to-month deal that I pay about $58 a month for, but I had to pay about 2 weeks worth of the $100 a month rate.

Overall, I find them borderline unethical to deal with. When I get motivated to deal with it, I'll pursue other options, but changing providers and service and email addresses is too much hassle right now, and the locally owned cable service, while probably as good as any of them, would just be a lateral move any way I look at it.

Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 6:53 pm
by James Steele
Well just an update. I went over and plugged my iBook into the DSL modem to see if the situation had improved and it has, but whether I can live with this, I'm not sure.

The download speed has nearly doubled in five days per the test at www.speakeasy.net

Jan 11th Test:
Download Speed: 346 kpbs (43.3 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 313 kpbs (39.1 KB/sec transfer rate)

Jan 16th Test:
Download Speed: 632 kpbs (79 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 308 kpbs (38.5 KB/sec transfer rate)

It's still sucking wind on downloads compared to cable... I'll see if this speeds up any more in another five days.