 Review by jsinaiko 
UPDATED: 158 days ago
member for 8.5 years, 2891 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Chicago,Cook,IL
 $34 per month
 AT&T
 "Reliable service lately - very few outages FANTASTIC tier 2 and higher support."
 "Waste-of-time tier one support. Improved in the last few months."
 "Good price. Reliable. But if something goes wrong, tier one support could be better."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Update: 6/17/09
Everything status quo. No major outages. BUT WHERE IS UVERSE FOR CHICAGO??!!
10/06/08
Everything still fine. No major problems or issues over the past few months. Presently we are waiting to see if AT&T UVerse ever gets to our neck of the woods. That would be nice.
1/29/08
Been on Elite for about two months now. No problems at all. Getting a solid 5098kbps down test after test, and not just the AT&T test, but other out-of-network tests, such as Speakeasy.
No outages, and no burps or slowdowns to date. It was a seamless transition from Pro to Elite.
11/30/07
Wolfdragon 1 - one of the AT&T personnel who watches the site to deliver customer service - has done a stellar job of getting me up to the Elite (6m bps down) tier. Turns out there may have been an error in the database that said my distance to the CO was too long. Wolfdragon 1 had this checked and corrected. I go online with the faster speed on 12/4/07. I'll report on the upgrade next week.
Update:
10/4/07
Service has continued to improve. No major outages over the past 10 months. Some sticky email issues, but these were resolved. If they occur again I may have to revise this update, but right now, no major complaints.
Except, I keep on being told I cannot get up to the 6.0 download "Elite" tier. I want it! Give it to me!
Update:
12/8/06
Service has continued to be reliable. Tier 1 support seems to have gotten slightly better - still comes up short. Tier 2 support, and particularly the AT&T folks who man their battle stations at BBR are the best. Beach Boy, Annonamoose, Toaster, and the others are simply the best I have ever encountered. hey fix the problem quickly, the don't insult your intelligence, they are nice and good humored, and obviously highly skilled.
Pricing and billing seem to have stabilized in the last year too.
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Before you read the sad and now rather ancient tale of woe around my migration from a UL to a LS, I want to say how great the upper-level techs like Beach Boy and Toaster are. They are the glue that holds the network together.
AT&T billing and tier 1 support are not good. But the guys at AT&T Direct and in the forums are the best, The quality of service they provide makes the rest worth it.
I’m a legacy Ameritech.net customer. First got DSL in the fall of 2000. Unbundled loop. Took three months for them to get over here to do the install.
For the first six months or so the service was awful. It was down almost as much as it was up. Nobody ever knew anything. Very frustrating. By the spring of 2001 the reliability of the network started to improve as it has steadily since then. Now we rarely go down and the speed is quire consistent. I am very satisfied with the over reliability and speed of the network.
That’s the good part. And it is good. Now for the bad part.
The sales folks lie. I’ve been a good customer. Every time I do what SBC wants me to do it turns into a huge headache, with the fault always being a total lack of coordination and/or good information on the part of SBC.
I resisted switching from my old Ameritech.net service to SBC Yahoo for about one year. Finally, by offering to cut the price in half, I agreed to let the migration occur. I wanted to retain my old unbundled loop, but that was not permitted, so they sent me a self-install kit, which I installed. All OK so far. Except they continued to bill me at the old rate. They almost lost all my email addresses. They failed to disconnect the UL and continued to bill me for that as well. It took hours and hours on the phone to get it all sorted out. I was trying to be a good customer and I got a lot of hassle for it. A nice tier two support guy straightened it out in a few minutes, but it took me hours and hours to get to tier two. Why don’t tier one people have access to the same information that tier two folks have?
Although every tier two SBC tech I have encountered has been helpful, extremely competent, and have been able to solve the issue, getting to tier two is like pulling teeth, and the tier one folks:
• Know nothing – all they ever seem to advise is to recycle your modem.
• Ask more questions then they answer – I am NOT calling support to give SBC info about myself; I am calling to get a question answered or to get help.
• Almost NEVER have relevant or up-to-date information about outages or other problems, thus rendering it impossible to know if the problem is out there on the network or is in my computer. Tier one generall thinks it is a problem with my computer which it never is.
Going back to the UL I had 768 downstream but they upgraded everyone a few months ago to 1500. I got a flier in the mail (snail) offering to give me 1.5 - 3.0 downstream for $36.99. As this is only a few bucks more than the $29.99 I was paying I jumped. Called them up - for some reason it wouldn't let me do it online - and set the thing up. No problem. Scheduled to kick in on 9/7.
9/7 came and went and nothing. The usual 1298 downstream. Same on 9/8. So I called in and asked what the story was. Turned out that they had ticked off the 1.5 box instead of the 3.0 box, so I was kept right where I was but for $7 per month more. Took three calls of one hour each, with most of that on hold to get it sorted, which it now is thanks to a couple decent tier 2 guys who took the time to sort it out for me.
This is nothing new. Whereas in the main SBC has run a reliable network since early 2001 (I've had them as my provider since 2000), I have encountered continuing CS problems every time I act like a good customer and bite on one of their offers. Back in 2000 it took them 3 months to get the install (an old unbundled loop) finished. There were lots of issues when I migrated from Ameritech.net (unbundled loop) to SBC Yahoo (line share) earlier this year. There have been several other very bad patches in between. It seems, at least in my case - I live in Chicago and am less than 5000' from the CO - SBC has difficulty executing a simple order. Without belaboring more than I am already, I'm sure they don't have any trouble shutting it all down if I don't pay my bill. They don't have any trouble trying to sneak little extra charges on my bill almost every month. Why is it so hard for them to execute a simple upgrade order? Makes me yearn for the days of Illinois Bell. To all SBC techs and front-line support folks, please know I have nothing but total respect for you - but the sort of thing I have gone through over the years reminds me of AOL, and that is NOT a good thing.
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