Review by Angrychair member for 11.4 years, 2400 visits, last login: a few hours ago updated 3 years ago
Jacksonville,Duval,FL
$42 per month about 20 days BellSouth "relatively high reliability" "speeds are mediocre by today's standards" "considering switching to comcast"
| Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money: (ratings match consensus)
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Standard Bellsouth residential speed ordered (1.5mbps down, 256kbps up). After a few weeks it was installed on the first visit. Things worked pretty smoothly at first. Downloads were definitely fast, going as high as about 1250kbps. Uploads were disappointingly slow, but no huge problem... about 200kbps. The modem is an alcatel speedtouch home, which seems to have broken down. Up until the last couple of weeks things with the service overall seemed great, but now that the modem's broke down I get to use dial-up (sheer pleasure..) Serviceman's supposed to come Friday September 22nd, but no telling how long it will actually take for me to get another alcatel modem judging from the stuff I've read on here about people having tough times getting an external ethernet modem...
Overall, when there's no problems, the connection is very steady, very fast, and an overall great deal... I just wish everyone would stop getting on so I could beat up on more modem users in quake like I had done to me for so many years.
I'll be sure to update on the bellsouth forum as to how the service visit goes.
*****UPDATE******
Well, I'm back to smooth sailing. Technician came on friday, and (as I thought) the modem wasn't the problem. The problem was at the dslam, a hurricane did pass through here last weekend.. maybe it took a surge, who knows. The important thing is, after the problem was correctly diagnosed (funny how the second line test asked for by a service tech got the problem isolated correctly) the repair took about 3 and 1/2 hours. Speed is back up to super, and I'm back to satisfied, just as long as things stay on...
Hopefully I won't have another outage for a few years though.. (always wishful thinking, eh? 
******UPDATE******
Well, it's been about 18 months since I last posted, and it's been purely smooth sailing since that point. Even through a move, they managed to have my dsl reconnected at my new location in about a week.
Bellsouth certainly does seem to have their stuff together..
*****UPDATE*****
Bellsouth was sold to AT&T, and quality of service has been on a steady decline. Speeds are mediocre when I even get the whole 3megs (most things seem to peg out around 1.5), pings bottom out on the best servers in the 80ms range (comcast at work is down in the 30-40ms range). I have comcast at work and it blows the AT&T 3meg dsl away. (2-3x as fast pretty much all the time)
*****UPDATE***** I've switched over to comcast. It's not perfect either, but the speeds and pings are lightyears beyond what att was willing to provide. Unfortunately comcast has been crapping out every couple of weeks for around a day at a time (problem clears up and I can start surfing just before a tech can arrive) but I have hope that the systematic problems with comcast can be fixed, unlike at&t's institutional ones.
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