US Telco Support > AT&T > AT&T U-verse > Leaving AT&T U-Verse FTTP after 2 years :(

reply to Gardentool

Re: Leaving AT&T U-Verse FTTP after 2 years :(

There's no crazy reason. It would cost money to update the ONTs and At&t management is about as big penny pinchers as you'd find.

They have a hard time finding reasons to spend money on things that would make tons, much less spend for 5% of their customers.

reply to Hilbe

reply to Gardentool
(First an aside: If ATT were about ultimate customer service [ala sonic.net], for even copper ADSL/VDSL, couldn't the modems support trading-off more downstream bandwidth for up (in the bit-loading allocation)? Instead of 24/3, customer could elect to lose 12M down, to gain another 1.5M up: 12/4.5?)

On FTTP madness: Giving FTTP subscribers their due (even just giving near symmetric 24/24), is feared to eat into lucrative business class subscribers? Or near symmetric feared to drive up P2P, torrenting, content-serving, ... more off-peak data transfer, higher average utilization?

Are there two types of neighborhood nodes (VRAD) serving the FTTP?
1. Those serving 90% or more fiber ports, in areas of new buildouts.
2. Those with 10% or fewer fiber ports (dating when fiber was young, 20 years ago), but dominated by copper.

For type-2, can theorize aggregate/total node BW/capacity is maintained for all/most ports at fully-loaded copper (triple play). If fiber-port terminations heavily outperformed copper, and fiber customers given a big BW boost, it would come at expense of turning off copper ports.

Which means losing subscribers, and the fiber customers would not pay enough to make up for loss of other (potentially) triple-play copper customers. ATT in love with the margins at the bottom of the market: relatively low BW, heavily asymmetric, low utilization/caps, where they can better oversubscribe the node capacity?

But for type-1 (new buildouts), have to believe total node capacity was designed better. Maybe ATT are sitting on warehouses of inventory of obsolete fiber termination equipment, that they can't bear to write off?

reply to Gardentool

I am quite happy with AT&T's 24 down / 3 up.. I know it's not as fast as some of the cable providers.. Only thing I have against ATT is their pricing is not as competitive as cable.. $72 a month for 24MB down compared to around $45-50 for 20MB/2MB with Time Warner... [can't get cable here though so I am stuck with AT&T].

reply to brookeKrige
From a technical standpoint, torrenting is not an issue. most torrent clients use uTP instead of TCP which helps tremendously with congestion.

But from a business standpoint, AT&T wants to sell their TV service. The sad fact is that Comcast(NBC) and AT&T are both TV companies. The internet is an afterthought.

reply to Gardentool
So when you cancel on FTTP, do they take back RG and the battery backup unit as well? I just signed up with Comcast and will be canceling AT&T. Curious.

BBU is yours and the RG will need to be sent back, usually UPS store can handle this, at least this was the procedure thru 8-2012 when I quit.

Is the BBU something I can sell on eBay or something. It is taking up a bunch of space in the garage.