quality of internet/cable service

[dman11235]

Okay, so I'm really mad at ATT now.  Watching the Stanley Cup finals, and we're going out of service every few minutes, so we keep missing chunks of the game.  This is really...annoying to say the least.  This is AFTER they had supposedly fixed our 2 year long battle with poor service, slow speeds, and frequent outages with no explanation.  Anyways, I want to know how often you guys have issues with your cable/internet service going out.  Maybe I can piece together a picture of whether or not our service is actually as terrible as I think it is.

And before people ask, yes, we've tried other services.  Where we are, ATT is probably the best (re: only) provider.  We had another, but switched because THEY were terrible.

[kurashu]

Odd, everyone I know with AT&T's Uverse (making an assumption here) has been really happy with it, myself included and I typically have the opinion that AT&T can go fuck itself. The only problem we've had was a CustServ person being unforgiving about a late payment -- but given the treatment that my girlfriend's grand parents gave him, I'm surprised we still have the service.

Whatever you do, don't switch to Comcast if that's even an option. And satelite will fuck you both ways, too. You might try resetting your physically connection via the router's control panel.

[dman11235]

Indeed I have Uverse.  You may be happy with it, but how often does your service go down?  Honestly, I think we have a partially cut cable between our house (re: gateway modem) and the road (where the splitter is for the neighborhood).  It's about 2600', according to the latest guy to come out to "fix" it, so distance shouldn't be a problem.  They went in and supposedly fixed the problem (one we've had for about two years) about a week and a half ago, but again, we have the problem.  I think the oddest thing about this whole problem is that it's mostly prevalent in the summer.  As in, when it's hotter.  Yeah.

And no, never doing satellite.  Never.  Ever.  Doing satellite.  Honestly considering Comcast, if this quality of connection keeps up.  Normally, when it is up, I'm fine  It's fast enough that i don't notice slow downs unless playing online game and watching online video at the same time, and the DVR function is nice, if stored in a stupid fashion.

[kurashu]

Other than that bill fiasco, our service has gone down maybe twice and then only very shortly.

[bhu]

Cable varies heavily where i am.  I have time warner and it almost never goes down.  However for people in neary larger cities it seems to be down almost as often as its up.  Other companies have similar quality issues by region or even specific neighborhoods.

[Jackinthegreen]

We had Qwest DSL for a while, but when they said they were upgrading things and to get upgraded speed the ISP had to be Microsoft, my dad said bullshit and eventually ended our service.  For a time we had both cable and DSL running so we could get around some annoyances of both, but as I said we eventually ended the DSL and went solely through Comcast.  So far it's been pretty good, but it feels like it's a rare circumstance.

[dman11235]

So about three weeks ago, a guy came in to fix the stuff again.  This time we got a result: it's not an ATT problem, it's a hardware issue.  The wire going from the splitter to our house is bad (hey, what did I say I thought the problem was?).  So they needed to send in a call for a contractor to come, dig up the old wire and replace it.  This was supposed to happen within the week.  It has not happened yet.  Every weekend, it's gone down.  Well, about every 6 days, doing the same thing it always has.  So good news: it's not our provider.  Bad news, it's still not fixed.  I think the worst thing about this is that this should have been fixed months or a year ago.  The guy showed me what the problem was.  I saw it.  And it still hasn't been fixed.  Not sure how much any of you know about the way this works, but basically, they have a bundle of five wires going from the splitter to the house.  Only one is hooked up at once, and when one goes bad, they just switch to the next one.  When it gets down to the last one, they start thinking about replacing the whole thing.  This would have been what, a year ago now that they switched to the last one?

[RobbyPants]

So about three weeks ago, a guy came in to fix the stuff again.  This time we got a result: it's not an ATT problem, it's a hardware issue.  The wire going from the splitter to our house is bad (hey, what did I say I thought the problem was?).  So they needed to send in a call for a contractor to come, dig up the old wire and replace it.  This was supposed to happen within the week.  It has not happened yet.  Every weekend, it's gone down.  Well, about every 6 days, doing the same thing it always has.  So good news: it's not our provider.  Bad news, it's still not fixed.  I think the worst thing about this is that this should have been fixed months or a year ago.  The guy showed me what the problem was.  I saw it.  And it still hasn't been fixed.  Not sure how much any of you know about the way this works, but basically, they have a bundle of five wires going from the splitter to the house.  Only one is hooked up at once, and when one goes bad, they just switch to the next one.  When it gets down to the last one, they start thinking about replacing the whole thing.  This would have been what, a year ago now that they switched to the last one?

That sucks. I'm assuming you're really low on the priority because it's not really profitable to them. You may have to push them a bit by threatening to cancel service, and if they aren't there within a week (or whatever), actually cancel the service. Of course, you'd need a backup to go to so you could have internet, which would likely cost more.

In my experience with AT&T, they tend to dick with you as long as they think they can, and will quickly fix the problem if they really believe they'll lose your business. I can think of two or three times we dealt with them in the past where three seemed to be the magic number: the first two calls, we'd get the run-around or some bullshit excuse. On the third call, we'd simply say "Never mind. We'd like to cancel our service." Miraculously, they were suddenly able to cut through the red tape and make things work.

Funny.

[archangel.arcanis]

Seriously screw AT&T. They gave us the run around any time we had DSL issues. They also would call me every 3 days for months to sell me their new faster DSL, wouldn't have been an issue if they could have actually been able to provide that service where I lived. What finally put the nail in their coffin with us, both cell and home phone/net, was when they began blocking Yahoo phone numbers. My wife's family is in Germany because her dad is in the military. The Army gave him a yahoo phone number back here so family could call it without having international phone charges. AT&T blocked it so they could get more people to buy their "discount" phone cards they sell to military families.

[dman11235]

They actually came to fix it finally!  I think.  I can't tell because we still go out.  See the rants thread.  There's a line in the ground where they replaced the line, but the replaced line ends before our house.  In other words, they replaced half the cable and spliced part of the old cable into the new cable.  That's what it looks like.

And yes, this is not ATT doing the cable replacement, but a contractor.  They don't lay their own lines, they hire someone else to do it.

[brujon]

Been reading about Google fiber... Apart from all the tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists out there that want to boycott the "botnet" as they call Google... I've been thinking, does anyone here live in Kansas City and is planning on acquiring the google service?

For those not in the loop... Google is making a tentative move to enter the ISP market, by going in hard with a very different approach. They are going to provide 1gb/s download speeds to residential addresses, for the low low cost of 90$ a month, and 5/10 mbps speeds for the ONE TIME ONLY construction fee of 300$, guaranteeing the service for at least 7 years. It's only available in Kansas City.

[veekie]

Thats gonna piss the ISPs there off something fierce.