AT&T Publicly Humiliated over crappy internet

[Helpful Tech Witch]

2 hours ago, Vishera said:

America is behind most of it's allies when it comes to Internet and health care...

I am sitting here happy with 1Gb/s and the best ISP you can ever have. (I am from Europe)

I don't know if yours in the best. I've been getting gigabit fiber for the cost of 100megabit fiber for a month or so.

[Orangeator]

Live in rural America, and you will be paying out the ass for the shittiest connection imaginable. Live in a city, you will have cheaper internet with 1,000 times the speed. Welcome to America's internet. Lol.

[Stormseeker9]

4 hours ago, Vishera said:

America is behind most of it's allies when it comes to Internet and health care...

I am sitting here happy with 1Gb/s and the best ISP you can ever have. (I am from Europe)

And who may that ISP be? (Also from eu)

[JamesTheFolf]

4 hours ago, HerrKaLeu said:

Ha ha. I just ditched AT&T 25 Mbit DSL a few months ago to get Spectrum 400 Mbit cable. AT&T was at least stable all the time, Spectrum cable modem trips out almost daily and needs to be re-set. 

 

so yes, we don't have really good choices. 

Yeah my family is in the same boat as yours. We could either get Spectrum 200Mbit or AT&T 8Mbit. Because AT&T is so slow, you really only have one option for internet you can use for actual stuff like WFH and at home school stuff.

 

Supposedly they are bringing fiber to our area, but it hasn't been done in our neighborhood yet.

[wamred]

Oof, that's funny. I do wonder what type of connection is though? The town next to me has AT&T Fiber and it is great there. That is good for things like that though. 

[Donut417]

Just now, wamred said:

do wonder what type of connection is though?

The article claimed Fiber I believe. AT&T stated they were going to upgrade the area, But to be honest probably not. 

[wamred]

2 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

The article claimed Fiber I believe. AT&T stated they were going to upgrade the area, But to be honest probably not. 

Yeah, I mean I work for a Fiber to the Home company and I don't see it being Fiber, but I mean I guess he could have had a bad connection or something? 

[WhitetailAni]

My aunts in Minnesota are super unlucky.

Fiber's spreading through their neighborhood, and they are the only house on their street (on both sides) to not have it.

And for our house and fiber, it's up the street. My dad called AT&T and they said "we can sell you dial-up!"

Edited February 14, 2021 by FakeKGB
late and forgot words

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, wamred said:

Yeah, I mean I work for a Fiber to the Home company and I don't see it being Fiber, but I mean I guess he could have had a bad connection or something? 

No. He had DSL, at 3 Mbps. But because of the shit press AT&T got, they installed Fiber. Because NO AT&T DSL connection I have seen goes above 100 Mbps PERIOD. Most people with AT&T DSL are probably on much lower speed tiers. 

[wamred]

1 minute ago, Donut417 said:

No. He had DSL, at 3 Mbps. But because of the shit press AT&T got, they installed Fiber. Because NO AT&T DSL connection I have seen goes above 100 Mbps PERIOD. Most people with AT&T DSL are probably on much lower speed tiers. 

Yeah we have CenturyLink DSL around here and unless you are within like 40 feet of their box you can't get above 3 Mbps.

[Intergalacticbits]

1 hour ago, wamred said:

Yeah we have CenturyLink DSL around here and unless you are within like 40 feet of their box you can't get above 3 Mbps.

CenturyLink DSL is all you can get where I live too except for old school satellite internet which around here is very expensive and I've heard has a bad rep for unhappy customers.

I can only get 1.5Mbps down and .5 up.

For all practical purposes they are like the only game in town for people who live outside of the small towns in the area and they know it.

The only game in town equals  no matter who owns that service.

 

[Intergalacticbits]

17 hours ago, Orangeator said:

Live in rural America, and you will be paying out the ass for the shittiest connection imaginable. Live in a city, you will have cheaper internet with 1,000 times the speed. Welcome to America's internet. Lol.

I wish everyone could really understand what your saying like I do lol.

More competition equals content customers  but the only game in town equals bad news no matter who owns that service.

 

I hope that Starlink service spreads fast across the US because I think it can really do the whole country a world of good.

I wish the federal government would give them big tax breaks plus extra help to lower the price and deploy it quickly.

To me it seems very similar to when DirecTv first hit the TV market way back when.

Back then that did very good things for people all across the country.

The company made super cash and people were more happy back when that first came out.

I think this could be so much the same again with the Starlink that I really think it would be worthy of cash support from the federal government to make it happen faster and cheaper in the beginning for rural consumers to get.

I hope it is as good as people are saying because if so I think people are going to be way better off in large numbers.

 

 

[Donut417]

3 minutes ago, Intergalacticbits said:

I wish the federal government would give them big tax breaks plus extra help to lower the price and deploy it quickly.

Smaller ISP's are fighting this tooth and nail. Probably because they want the money so they can pocket it. My mom informed me that my Uncle out in South Dakota picked up  Starlink service/dish. Between Starlink, T Mobile Home internet I think we might start seeing some competition. Will it make other companies more competitive? Probably not. 

[xtroria]

I've had good internet connections while living in the US. That said I lived in seattle and minneapolis, 2 high tech urban cities.

 

The size of the US and the amount of people living the suburbs makes tech like starlink more viable than deploying cables tbh

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, xtroria said:

he size of the US and the amount of people living the suburbs makes tech like starlink more viable than deploying cables tbh

I dont think Starlink will handle heavy heavy users. Also the subs are mostly wired. Its the small towns and rural areas that get neglected. Those who choose to live out in the sticks will at least have a better option. 

 

The fact is internet via cable will always be superior to internet delivered via wireless. Also these telecoms get too many tax breaks and tax dollars to not wire up the subs. 

[Orangeator]

41 minutes ago, Intergalacticbits said:

but the only game in town equals bad news

This times a thousand! When there is only one ISP for an area, they pretty much do whatever they want and you deal with it. End of story. It's literally a local monopoly. 

[TempestCatto]

11 hours ago, HerrKaLeu said:

Ha ha. I just ditched AT&T 25 Mbit DSL a few months ago to get Spectrum 400 Mbit cable. AT&T was at least stable all the time, Spectrum cable modem trips out almost daily and needs to be re-set. 

 

so yes, we don't have really good choices. 

What modem? I've had issues with Arris modems, they overheat. We had to put a small desk fan in front of ours to keep it cool. It's perfectly stable now (been 3 years without issue).

[Euchre]

When you talk about monopolies and rural internet, it is definitely a crapfest. Now, land based ISPs will try to argue they aren't a monopoly in a lot of rural areas, because satellite is 'everywhere' (except where geography makes 'seeing' the satellite impossible, which is a good number of places) - but the service is incomparable. I went from satellite as the only real option to DSL once fiber was laid next to the small village where my CO is, and the phone line infrastructure is total crap out here. Farmers wreck the little phone line junction boxes a lot, but the telco won't try to hold them accountable, nor bother to fix them, because 'they'll just get broken again'. Never mind that flush to the ground 'surface' boxes exist, and would reduce the problems by a ton, they won't invest in the infrastructure. As for cable - if you aren't on a corridor between 2 major markets, forget it. Only reason I had cable internet in the mountain town where I used to live, was because the cable provider for the city on the eastern side of the mountains was originally based on the western side, and they ran trunks up over the mountains. All of the towns in the canyon were served because of that, and they actually ditched a few after that city exploded in population, and got a major terrestrial connection (presumably major fiber lines) run down from the north, so they didn't need the over the mountain run.

 

The fuss made over a 3mbps connection 'sucking' is to me a whiny child with very first world problems. When my connection works right, I top out at just double that, and that's after I was lucky enough to get terrestrial connectivity here. I'd have better speeds if they had enough copper laid and working, but alas, that's more infrastructure the telco doesn't want to invest in.

 

Until the US decides to commit to broadband infrastructure like it did for rural electrification and phone connectivity, and we lay fiber out to the majority of what is now served by copper or cable, there'll be an internet caste system.

[Rugg]

10 hours ago, Donut417 said:

I dont understand why they cant just standardize pricing across the US

"Supply and demand", the likely result of a legal obligation to price control internet access would be that companies would expand even less than they already are.

[leadeater]

< removed by LogicalDream >

 

Like your internet costs, the fact that in almost all areas of the US you pay more than I do and on top of that in general have a data cap doesn't make the quality of your internet connection better than mine. It's even worse than that too if you compare the diversity of options, I pay for a business connection and their are different tiers of that too so to be up front I pay for the lowest however that gives me 1Gbps with higher priority than residential connections along with 24/7 support and any outages have to be notified to me in advance. I also benefit from different peering rules and route paths, my connection is peered and routed much closer to where I actually live compared to residential ones which are almost always terminated through to Auckland then routing evaluations done on the traffic regardless of where you actually live. Now this is fine if all you do is general internet stuff but if you are accessing things internal to NZ not so much, I don't have 10ms added on to my RDP sessions remoting in to work.

 

I also pay for my own /28 public IP range, now what do I pay for this service?  $110 USD/month. I'm not aware of any option that exists in the US that is either equivalent or as cheap. You certainly have business connections but those are more like the higher tier ones than mine and they cost far far more.

 

A high cost of a service does not necessarily make it better or allow it to be better and the high cost of it may have little to do with the quality of it itself and rather different factors that have more to do with privatized care and clinical research. Likewise the high cost of your internet has little to do with expansion and upgrades and more to do with lobbying and protection efforts to maintain the current situation.

 

11 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

On the internet side of things yeah you can usually pay to have fiber or cable run to your house if you have enough money and the isp has somewhere nearby they can connect to but it will cost alot usually. 

Even here when things were worse I've tried to go down this path, there is little to no interest from anyone to actually do it. Because of my work I know how much it costs, where things are and who to talk to, the answer was still no and there wasn't an amount high enough within my means to change that to a yes. That figure to change it to a yes is way the hell up there, like just buy another house up there.

Edited February 14, 2021 by LogicalDrm

[Rugg]

35 minutes ago, Orangeator said:

This times a thousand! When there is only one ISP for an area, they pretty much do whatever they want and you deal with it. End of story. It's literally a local monopoly. 

While its unfortunate. It makes a lot of economic sense that most regions are very monopolistic. If you can start business in an area with no internet at all, why would you want to fight another company in an area that already has internet?

[Orangeator]

3 minutes ago, Rugg said:

While its unfortunate. It makes a lot of economic sense that most regions are very monopolistic. If you can start business in an area with no internet at all, why would you want to fight another company in an area that already has internet?

I understand why it happens, there should just be standards and regulations. Regulations that keep the price and quality of service to the same level that is provided in cities... 

[Intergalacticbits]

10 hours ago, Letgomyleghoe said:

Century link is in my area with 940/940 for $65 a month unlimited, but they require me to use their "totally free" modem so I'm a little sketched on that.

Your sketchy is my sucky lol. 

 

I buy my 1.5Mbps down and .5Mbps up from a third part provider who gets it from CenturyLink. That is as fast as I can get.

My provider last month told me on the phone that here locally CenturyLink was requiring them to require me to buy their CenturyLink modem/router for $100.00 plus pay another $100.00 to have it installed. My third party service provider told me that if I didn't comply that my internet service would be shut off possibly by the end of this month.

 

I installed my own router before in the past so you can imagine I'm not happy.

Plus they don't give any self purchase router band names that I recognize and favor like Netgear or others as alternative choices.

Just one brand I never heard of before.

My service provider said this was required because of some phone company service upgrades but it just seems like a slap in the face to me.

This is a "only game in town situation" for me where I live.

 

So even though I understand how your sketchy on it. I am still wishing I could get it "totally free" like you because after looking it over on their website.

Myself If I had seen it in a store I wouldn't even buy it for cheap lol.

Let alone pay a guy an extra $100.00 to run a isolated phone jack that I could do myself for donut money.

 

 

[Rugg]

1 minute ago, Orangeator said:

I understand why it happens, there should just be standards and regulations. Regulations that keep the price and quality of service to the same level that is provided in cities... 

The problem with that is building infrastructure for high speed internet is so much more expensive per-person in these low density regions. You would need very careful regulation to retain industry's desire to expand, and idk about you but I don't have faith in government to control prices well enough.

[Donut417]

21 minutes ago, Euchre said:

Until the US decides to commit to broadband infrastructure like it did for rural electrification and phone connectivity, and we lay fiber out to the majority of what is now served by copper or cable, there'll be an internet caste system.

They do provide funds for rural internet. Its just its not enough. Where do you expect them to get the money? The tax payers dont want to pay more. And even if they have the money who's says the telecoms wont just turn around the pocket it? 

 

If the US government were to throw its weight behind better internet two things need to happen. 1) 25/3 cant be considered broadband, it should be a higher number, especially on the upload side. 2) Municipal broadband needs to become protected under Federal Law. No more states banning it because telecoms keep writing laws to do so. 

 

Its in my opinion that the last mile of the network should be public owned. As a customer you should just be able to go thru a list of ISP's that provide services that you want.