Review by demontop 
Posted: 78 days ago
member for 7.1 years, 200 visits, last login: 15 days ago
 Chicago,Cook,IL
 Business customer
 $50 per month (24 month contract)
 about 45 days
 AT&T
 "When it's up, it's up and fairly steady"
 "Not much speed bang for the buck, if there's an outage - god help you!"
 "Now that Cable is available to businesses in our area, we're making the jump when our contract is up."
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(ratings match consensus)
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We office out of an old converted factory/warehouse building that's long since been chopped up into smaller offices and studio spaces. There wasn't an IT infrastructure here to begin with, and now there's some sort of jerry-rigged phone/data cabinet downstairs and lots of naked conduit running all over the place. Getting phone service here was simple enough and after the first month or so dealing with dial-up, we finally got AT&T DSL installed. We're at 1500k down, 384k up ADSL at 49.95/mo though our local and LD come on the same bill.
We were fine for the longest time, though we learned the hard way that there's some wacky wiring somewhere in the nether regions of the building between our space and the makeshift data closet. When we had an additional phone line installed, we started getting DLS drop-outs where the modem would lose connection and then make numerous attempts to reconnect. We deduced there was a problem somewhere between the junction box and our office space, but AT&T techs repeatedly conduct their tests and assure us there must be something with the wiring in our space (we installed many of the phone jacks ourselves) even though nothing in the physical configuration has been changed since we moved in.
Then earlier this year there was a fire on a transformer outside our building. It burned up the main power to our building, tripped a couple other transformers in the area, and then the burning power line fell onto the phone lines also servicing our building. The power was out a few days, and upon our return to the building, no phone and of course no DSL. Phone service was restored within another two days, but the DSL service never returned, and in-fact the line where the DSL modem is plugged in had no dial-tone whatsoever. After haggling with AT&T repeatedly, and trying to appeal to the better nature of the AT&T techs in the building working on various phone issues (the security guard would call us whenever a phone guy would come into the building to access the box so that we could check our phones and internet since they mysteriously seemed to go out when there was work being done)
After a phone outage this week (storms) the modem seemed to not want to reconnect so my boss called tech support. AT&T rather arbitrarily reset the account password in the process of reconnecting the modem, but didn't tell anybody so it took some sleuthing to figure out why our network router couldn't use the connection like usual.
After much pleading with the boss on my part, we're switching over to Comcast Workplace - whatever their faults, I feel like we'll have more bang for our buck. We're keeping a traditional phone line (barebones) for redundancy, but we intend to go VoIP for our primary phone usage and shrink our AT&T bill down to zilch.
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