 Review by StillLearn 
UPDATED: 1.1 years ago
member for 7.6 years, 3733 visits, last login: 1 days ago
 Streamwood,Cook,IL
 $34 per month (12 month contract)
 about 7 days
 AT&T
 "Reliable fast connection, almost no packet loss"
 "passable usenet and web server offering"
 "Exceeded expectations. Reliable connectivity"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Original:
Initially I applied for DSL and cable both, and each was
unavailable. The first that became available was Cable from ATTBI.
It was good. I felt that the fact that it shared a cable was an
advantage in that any outage would affect a lot of people, and so
get fixed faster. It had 1500 MTU. In those days, for DSL you had
to run an application on your computer to do PPPoE. While cable
was more expensive, I felt it was probably better. It did have
packet loss at times, which I learned was due to upstream frequency
ingress. ATTBI was bought by Comcast.
I had come to expect that less than 0.5% packet loss was OK, and
that 1% was tolerable. I wrote my own logging program that would
ping my Comcast gateway, and I later ran Ping Plotter continually
(I still do, but not because of any problem). Near the end I was
getting >5% loss frequently, and two service calls did not fix it,
I decided to try DSL. My expectations were that the DSL would have
some packet loss, and that the Usenet and Email of the DSL would be
inferior.
DSL very much exceeded my expectations. Packet loss was
non-existent. Theoretically slower (3 MB vs 4 MB, it felt as least
as fast. And while the Usenet and Email were not quite as good as
for Comcast, they very much exceeded my expectations. Personal web
space of Geocities with ads was a step down, but that was not
important. The free dialup for contingency or travel and even some
free 802.11 hotspots is a plus. Newer DSL modems do the protocol
stuff for you, and the 1492 MTU is not significant.
I upgraded DSL to 6MB. That felt similar for browsing, but it gave
faster downloads. Latencies are low. SN margin dropped about 8
dB, but packet loss is only about 0.01% -- less that 1 lost ping
per day pinging every 10 seconds, but up from zero.
I have friends with problem-free Comcast and DSL. The better
choice will vary at different locations. The Ameritech/SBC/ATT
folks are much more forthcoming and proactive with information
about problems or outages, especially at DSL Reports. I just read
of outages. They have not affected me so far.
Update 2008 September 29
Still doing well, enjoying the reliability. Usenet servers do fine with me, altho high-volume users might think otherwise. Email has improved, but the main thing is connectivity. And that is really nice. Incoming email is very good, and I make good use of AddressGuard. There was a problem with SMTP, but that has improved to where I seldom need to use a workaround.
Having customer support available via DSLR is really nice too.
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