Internet at Home in NC, USA

AT&T DSL

I live in a small town in North Carolina (NC) with a population of approximately 10,000, half of those are students at the local university. The terrain is mountainous. These factors significantly limit the Internet options.

I opted for the AT&T DSL service because there was already a telephone line into the house I am renting. There was also cable but because I wanted to watch rugby I took the counsel of one White African and tracked down Direct TV who offer Setanta.

I chose the AT&T - FastAccess DSL Direct 3.0M service, which has the following features;

• DSL without a phone line (I have a VOIP telephone account with Vonage)
• 3 Mbps/384 Kbps (Maximum Downstream /Upstream)
• $42.95 per month
• Modem (2-Wire 2701HG-B) that supports a Wi-Fi network, at a cost of $100 USD for a 2 year contract.

The Good;

The uptime of the service has been fantastic; the Internet connection has failed about four times in 1 year. On 3 of occasions I have powered off the modem and powered it on again and the Internet connection was restored.

The Internet speed measures up to the advertised speed. I test often with SpeedTest.net.

The Bad;

It took me 9 weeks to sign up with AT&T and get Internet at home. The combination of being new in the USA and then having to deal with the bureaucracy of the US government and AT&T was terrible. I had to get my social security card, drivers license, pay a security deposit of $50 with AT&T (I did not have prior credit history) and then wait 3 weeks for AT&T to resolve their internal issues and connect me.

The Ugly;

Customer support at any large company is bad, it is horrific with the monstrous Ma Bell (AT&T).

On the fourth occasion that my Internet went down. It took me a whole hour to call in to 1 888 321 2375, waiting for the most of this time, and spoke for 15 minutes with 2 people who did not come across as competent or were at the end of an 8 hour sift and were brain dead.

My problem was my Internet was down, the first person checked on this, walked me through powering down my modem which I had already done 3 times earlier and then had me open the command prompt (CMD) and do a ipconfig which yielded strange IP addresses. He then asked me to do a an ipconfig remove which I later figured was a wrong command it should have beenipconfig renew.

He said he could do no more, he thought one of my drivers had failed. He handed me over to the support plus department where a lady began by professionally confirming I was the account holder and then started sales pitch about the wonderful service that ConnecTech offers; $149 for 6 months, $249 for 1 year or $99 for a one time remote service with a 5 day guarantee. I think AT$T are insane to even have such a service, let alone hand off a client to this department before they have done all they could to fix a problem.

Needless to say I did not accept either service and opted to fix my machine myself if AT&T were so sure the Internet connection was good. I was certain my hardware and software were okay and I did not need drivers reinstalled for $100USD. I removed the Vonage box that the Internet hooks up into and connected directctly to the laptop did an ipconfig and wow my service was back up. I then reconnected the Vonage box and Internet still up. Problem fixed.