Review by hga 
member for 4 years, 1353 visits, last login: 1 days ago
updated 1.2 years ago
 64801
 $28 per month AT&T "Rock solid." "A bit expensive if you just consider speed/cost." "If you want reliablity without paying big bucks go with AT&T DSL"
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(ratings match consensus)
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Because of their technical culture vs. the cable companies I've only gone with telephone company broadband service, Verizon (2001-2004) and now AT&T: 2004 or 5-6 at one house, 2007 to now at my apartment although I still help maintain my parents' 2 AT&T DSL connections; this review reflects the experiences of all three connections.
I've enjoyed rock solid service. It's not fast, their "Express" at 1.5 Mbps/384 Kbps, but with only a few special case/unusual exceptions the service has been absolutely reliable. I don't knock them for a days long power outage from an ice storm that eventually drained DSLAM batteries or the squirrel who immolated himself on a transformer and knocked down a power line that induced enough current in the phone line to toast a 2Wire modem/router.
The only problem of note was a very strange intermittent fault that I and others who were affected helped AT&T diagnose on their dedicated forum on this site. They swapped out all the hardware they could and eventually in desperation air freighted in a replacement for the Cisco box that serves SW Missouri from Springfield (home -DSL> DSLAM -ATM> Cisco box and AT&T's internal Internet). These things happen (I've been playing the networking game since 1982 (sic) or so) and they handled it as well as anyone would.
When this particular line was brought into service in 2007 the DSLAM line card was bad (voice worked but DSL didn't really); one phone call got a service guy out there within a day as I recall (maybe hours???). He called me to make sure he'd fixed and and told me this apartment's new copper was as hoped for very good and I indeed get pretty much the provisioned up and down speeds.
Other nice things about the AT&T network:
Skype and Internet radio at 56Kbps work very well with only a glitch in a blue moon (and it's not clear who's at fault then).
They've got two stratum 2 Network Time Protocol servers that are open for their customers and that are 0.025 seconds away from me.
But the bottom line is that their service is very reliable. If you're not so demanding of raw speed but it has to be there whenever you need it seriously consider them.
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