 Review by jimkyle 
UPDATED: 1.9 years ago
member for 7 years, 3623 visits, last login: 1 days ago
 Oklahoma City,Oklahoma,OK
 Business customer
 $79 per month
 about 20 days
 Southwestern Bell
 "Excellent on-line support"
 "Company web pages still badly out of date"
 "Excellent value and extremely reliable"
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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In my city, only two non-dialup options were available when I decided to get better speed. They were Cox Cable's @home service, and SBC's ADSL (with several resellers but only one actual plant). Having grown totally disillusioned with service from Cox (and dropping their cable in favor of a satellite dish for TV), that left me only one option.
I initially ordered basic residential service in April of 2000, as soon as it became available in my area. Because of distance from the CO and weak signal, I had to be capped at 384K download in order to have the service at all. Nevertheless that was still much better than dial-up and I was quite happy with it until encountering an EMI problem in late summer of 2002. While searching for a solution to that I discovered that an RT had been available in my area since November 2000 although I had not been notified of the possibility to upgrade my account.
I immediately ordered service on my second POTS line, to take advantage of the RT without down time, and placed my order on-line. It was confirmed, but the due date came and went with nothing happening. When I called, the sales rep could find no trace of the order; I placed it again, upgrading it to the 1500/256 5-static-IP business service since I do use the line for my data recovery service. This time, things happened exactly on schedule, and thanks to the official SBC reps here in the Southwestern Bell forum, I now have true broadband service, free of problems.
In the past five years I've had no significant signal outages, although my original modem (SpeedStream 5260) is showing its age and the replacement I bought at the time of the upgrade (5360) is also getting long in the tooth. Looks like I'll need to pick up a 4100 before long. (Edit as of December 2007: Both of the old modems finally did give up the ghost, and I'm now using a 4100 which does a great job.)
The company itself seems not to have many clues about using their web sites to best advantage, though. The help files are hopelessly out of date. Placing an on-line order simply didn't work, even though I received a "confirmation" E-mail message. The excellent support provided in the forum here, however, more than compensates for that shortcoming. I've learned more about the technical details of getting and keeping good service in the years that I've been active here, than I could ever hope to discover elsewhere.
Not long after I moved to the RT, the company discontinued true static IPs in favor of "sticky PPPoE" addresses. Were it not for that and the fact that any changes to my service would convert me to PPPoE connections, I'd take advantage of the price changes that would give me 6000/768 speeds for the same price I pay for 1536/512. Since I use a Linux box as my firewall and router, I'm unwilling to switch to PPPoE at all, and continue the service unchanged.
Bottom line: I'm a mostly happy camper, and advise anyone considering the choice between SBC and other providers to visit the forum here and get the real low-down before making any decisions. It's now been 5 years since I made the service change from CO to RT, and it's still performing excellently even though my costs are not in line with current standards.
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AT&T Southwest
