Review by Devistater 
UPDATED: 1.4 years ago
member for 4.8 years, 336 visits, last login: 255 days ago
 Clovis,Fresno,CA
 $35 per month
 about 12 days
 SBC
 "GREAT DSL service, I love my 6mbit (6008/768). The online SBC customer support from dslr is GREAT."
 "The PHONE customer support stinks."
 "Overall its well worth it."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
|
I've been with SBC/Pacbell for a few years now.I started out paying $50 for 1.5 megabit service. I've always has PPPoE dynamic IP. In the spring of 2004 SBC has the special deal where if you ordered 3mbit service for $45 a month, you automatically got the 6mbit (6000/608) service. I signed up for that and never looked back. They upgraded me within 10-12 days. Initially I had poor speeds and I even went to the trouble of doing a home run with a splitter in the outside telephone box. Then I upgraded my router from a crappy old linksys NR014, to a linksys wrt54g. The ROUTER was my problem, I immidiatly jumped from 3mbit speeds to 6mbit speeds. My download speed is greater than 650kbytes/sec and my upload is greater than 65kbyte/sec.
During the upgrade, only part of my speed was upgraded, and the rest was over due. I contacted the official SBC support techs on www.dslreports.com and within MINUTES they had fixed the issue. The official SBC techs who help out thier customers on DSLR are AWESOME!
However the phone support for SBC is not that good. They talk with heavy accents and if you just want to report an outage they make you go through all these idiotic steps. If you can, avoid phone support and contact the official SBC techs here.
Speaking of outages, overall the connection time has been great. Over a couple years the longest outage has been on the order of about 8 hours, and that only happened once. Most outages have been around 30 minutes once every 6 months. I'd say average outage time is under 5 minutes a month. Part of the outages I think are due to my living in a brand new neighborhood where they frequently work on the phone and power lines.
Overall SBC has been well worth it.
Update: I still love my 6mbit service. Now SBC is selling it again for about $50, so you can finally get it too if you want it  My bill is still the same (some people were worried that the price would go up after a year, it hasn't). The only real competition IMHO is verizon FIOS which you can get 15mbit/2mbit for $50 a month. Unfortunately this is only availible in very limited areas, and I'm not in one of them.
Oh and SBC phone support still sucks. Get help on this site through the official SBC forums.
Update 2:
I had $30 a month DSL for a year contract that just expired last month (4-2007). During that time they also updated my upstream to 768kbit. Now the price is up to $35 a month, but the good news is there's no contract now!
My outages have gotten significantly less over the years, and less disconections, so I think my neighborhood is finally getting mature phone/DSL connections.
The phone support is still blah, regardless of if they call it ATT or SBC. They never want to take a service outage report unless you go through a bunch of crap.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Pacific Bell - SBC |
|
Pacific Bell - SBC
(18)