 Review by shawnyboy 
Posted: 1.3 years ago
member for 7.5 years, 178 visits, last login: 225 days ago
 Waller,Harris,TX
 Contract price not specified. (12 month contract)
 about 5 days
 AT&T
 "Virtually no downtime when switching from AT&T, VOIP seems more stable, they don't block port 25 outbound."
 "Slightly higher price than AT&T, one service outage so far, after-hours support is shaky."
 "So far, so good."
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I've had SBC/AT&T DSL ever since it became available to me in December of 2005. Overall, I had no problems with AT&T other than the post-intoductory pricing and the fact that they block port 25 outbound. I host my own mail server, and having to use their SMTP relay as the "last-mile" was a bit frustrating, but I got over it. In the roughly 18 months that I had service, I don't recall ever experiencing an outage, and the speeds were around 2500 Kbps for my 1.5-3.0 MB package. I don't do much (if any) gaming, and I had only recently gotten VOIP, so upload speeds weren't that big of a deal, but I was averaging around 400 Kbps. All in all, I was happy.
The straw that broke the camel's back had to do with AT&T's new decision to require SSL on outbound SMTP traffic. I had been watching Oplink on DSLR and with their new introductory pricing, I decided to switch.
The good:
I signed up online, and within minutes I had received my welcome letter. The really cool thing is that I never lost service with AT&T until the day my Oplink service went live. I work from home, so that saved me a few hour-loing commutes into the office.
I have SunRocket VOIP, and I was constantly rebooting my gizmo to get my phone to start working again. It's been a lot more stable with Oplink. It might be coincedence, but running straight ethernet as opposed to PPPoE probably doesn't hurt things, either.
The bad:
Last week (week of 5/14), I lost service for about 15-20 minutes. I called the support line and got a recording that all customers were affected and that they were working on the issue. Not a big deal, but after almost 18 months without an outage, it was disheartening to have one a few days into my service. According to my buddy, it was the first outage that he's been aware of, so I'll chalk it up to bad luck.
I moved into an apartment last week, and while it took AT&T less than 24 hours to move my phone service, it took 5 days to get DSL up and running (evidently, that's AT&T's rule, not theirs). Service was supposed to have been live by 5/22 at 7:00 PM, but that deadline came and went. I called support at about 8:45 PM. There is no live after-hours support, but the voice mail service is supposed to page someone out. Needless to say, I didn't get a call until the next morning. As soon as I spoke with someone, the problem was resolved quickly. I was just bummed that it took until the next day to speak with someone.
All in all, I'm happy with Oplink. The service is a bit more flexible for what I do, and I like going with the smaller, local provider. As long as outages are near zero, I'll stick around.
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