AT&T broadband users frustrated

MSNBC ^ | 12/8/01 | Rachel Konrad

[cd jones]

AT&T here in Corona, CA (formally mediaone.net) working like a champ, no diff in speed, was only down 1 day.

[Bubba_Leroy]

128K is what I get on my ISDN line (I'm in a small town and DSL and cable modems aren't available).

[Hillary 666]

I'm willing to give AT&T the benefit of the doubt for now. They just got their new network on-line and I don't expect everything to be perfect right out of the gate. But AT&T better be hot on the trail of some solutions. If I don't see improvement pretty soon, I'll consider jumping over to another service.

[IncPen]

AT&T in Chicago's West & North Suburbs... in a word: disaster.

Their consumer-realtions is embarassing... really, really bad....

[The Duke]

Sounds like a good opportunity to allow free market competition take care of itself...

[LibWhacker]

Here's a real interesting excerpt from another article (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/12/05/BU129831.DTL&type=tech) on the fiasco:

McNutt said creditors are looking into whether they can sue AT&T and other cable operators for draining money from the company by forcing ExciteAtHome to sign unprofitable contracts with cable operators. The cable companies set up ExciteAtHome and controlled the board of directors. AT&T owns three-quarters of ExciteAtHome's voting stock.

Looks like AT&T was up to its eyebrows in the scheme to force Excite@Home into bankruptcy so they could pick up the company for peanuts (not that Excite isn't blameless!). Some way to treat your customers, is all I've got to say.

[LibWhacker]

Pinging that last comment to you because it may have looked like I was ignoring you. But I wasn't. I was cutting and pasting, editing and formatting! :-)

[Hillary 666]

Sounds like a good opportunity to allow free market competition take care of itself...

That's what I'm thinking. If somebody can give me the services that AT&T is claiming they can at a decent price, I'll take a good hard look. This is a great opportunity for AT&T to step up and fix their problems or let their customers leave to someone who can.

[SoDak]

I'm still @home. Will be until February I guess, then will be migrated to another service.

[engrpat]

I was with @home now with AT&T in Arlington, Texas....the change over was smooth, down about 24 hours. Have not had one minute of trouble and the speed is as fast as before.

[tjg]

640kb/s w/ DSL (qwest). Had it 6 months. Not one bit of trouble, knock on wood.

$30/month for 24/7 service. I'd pay twice that without even thinking about it.

[TopDog2]

	Connection Type		Connection Speed	Faster Providers
	28.8 Kbps		Dial-up 28.8k
	33.6 Kbps		Dial-up 33.6k
	53.3 Kbps		Dial-up 56k
	64 Kbps		ISDN 64k
	83.1 Kbps		83.1 kbps
	128 Kbps		ISDN 128k	New York Internet
	384 Kbps		DSL 384k	New York Internet
	768 Kbps		DSL 768k	DIRECTV DSL™
	1500 Kbps		DSL 1.5MB	EarthLink Inc.

As you can see, at 83.1 Kbps, I'm no where near where I should be using AT&T Broadband. It is frustrating, but on the upside, I'm not getting anything near the number of attampts on my firewall that I got with @Home.

[jlogajan]

Ha, wrong. Porn built the internet.

[Don Joe]

There was a hokey movie -- with a very pithy (and quite tinfoilesque) plot line -- made in the late '60s or early '70s called "The President's Analyst". I won't spoil the plot, since it's worth renting to watch, but I will mention something that sprang to mind when I read that article.

In the movie, James Coburn is talking with Omar Shariff (playing the part of a spy), who tells him that he's been in countless countries across the world, all completely different from each other, but in every country he'd ever been in, there was one thing they all had in common. Everyone, he said, in every country in the world, hates the phone company.

[Reeses]

I just tested the AT&T cable speed at http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/

My speed is 46.8k, slower than a 56k modem. I'm paying $50+/month for this.

[jlogajan]

"Porn built the internet."

And porn will probably take it down.

This will be amusing -- perhaps you can diagram how that will come about -- leaving aside your Old Testament Biblical wrath visions -- let's just keep it to reality.

[jlogajan]

My AT&T in Mpls/StPaul area is about 800k down -- pretty typical. I can get local server content at about 1.4M.