Review by Gaff  - Location: Mineral Wells,Palo Pinto,TX
- Cost: $40 per month
- Install: about 16 days
 AT&T
Good "Low latency, speedy browsing"
Bad "Lower speeds than my old cable, PPPoE overhead means you don't get advertised speeds"
Overall "Solid and reliable, but slow"
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After working with my previous provider, Suddenlink, trying to nail down excessive packet loss and speeds barely faster than dialup at peak times over a period of several months, I eventually cracked and decided to give DSL a shot (ironically they seem to have fixed the packet loss issues shortly after I ordered the DSL).
It was almost 2.5 weeks from the day I ordered until the service was live, but this delay was mostly due to porting my current telephone number from Suddenlink to AT&T.
Since Suddenlink had changed some of the wiring around in my house to be compatible with their cable telephone without needing to do a lot of re-wiring then I went ahead and scheduled a technician install of my DSL to straighten this out. The port was scheduled to be completed on 3/9 but the earliest a technician could be at my house was going to be 3/12. Oh well I figured, and confirmed the appointment.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that bright and early on the 9th an AT&T engineer was at my house to complete installation of the landline. I had assumed that they would just flick a switch at the CO and that would be that (until Thursday's tech appointment) but their guy was in and out of here in a flash and had everything working fine in less than 15 minutes.
With these wiring issues taken care of I went ahead and cancelled the scheduled tech install of the DSL on Thursday, since a self-install should only take me a few minutes.
I plugged the DSL modem in the next day (Tuesday 3/10), they day AT&T had told me my DSL would be active by, and the modem sync'd up immediately.
Download speeds are only ~1.5Mbit down currently but I am hoping that this will ramp up over the next 10 days to at least 2.5Mbit down. At 12,000 feet away from the CO I know that this is about the maximum I can expect due to the limitation in distance with regards to DSL. The supplied modem is a Motorola 2210 that AT&T are charging me $50 for but that has a $50 MIR so will work out to be free. You can't beat that.
Overall I am happy so far with the performance and will update this review accordingly with any particular praise or major issues.
------------------- UPDATE 3/20/09 -------------------
With a lot of help from David over on the AT&T Direct board I found that my line quality was good enough to be able to qualify for Elite (6 Mb) speeds, since my Pro line had fully ramped-up to 3 Mb without issue.
I placed the order to upgrade from Pro to Elite ($5 a month extra, $35 a month instead of $30) and am waiting for it to be implemented in the next couple of days.
Big thanks to David on AT&T Direct!
------------------- UPDATE 3/26/09 -------------------
Now up and running on Elite with no issues. Modem is sync'd at 6016 and then minus the ~12% PPPoE overhead puts my max at about 5300, and my speed tests are showing 5100-5300 so I am right up at where I should be.
------------------- UPDATE 8/14/12 -------------------
I have cancelled all of my AT&T service, including DSL. Whilst there was nothing wrong with the service itself, I could no longer justify paying $40 a month for a 5Mbit connection, especially since the new "overage" charges meant I was frequently paying $10-$20 extra a month on top of that for going over 150GB a month.
DSL is yesterday's technology and you pay through the nose for it. DOCSIS 3 and fibre is the future.
member for 14 years, 3342 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated 1.1 years ago
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