Welcome to the 21st Century!

    Friday I took another foray into the 21st century.  I upgraded my DSL.  I started the century with a 28k dial-up connection and, in September 2007, finally entered the world of high-speed Internet by getting the lowest connection speed AT&T offered, a 768k DSL service.  768: that was 27 times faster than what I was used to.  I was overjoyed, felt like I had been shot out of a cannon. 

    Even though everyone I knew had anywhere from 3 to 8 mb of speed, me with my little 0.7 still seemed behind the times BUT, as far as I was concerned it was plenty fast enough.  Except for the minor inconvenience that video would occasionally freeze for a few seconds while the buffer caught up, I saw no difference between this and the faster speeds.  Even at this low speed, emails opened instantly, web sites came up instantly.  What more did you want?  I didn’t have a problem with it.  I’ve been paying $20/month since 2007 for my 0.7 connection.  For video, 3.0 was recommended, but that would cost $30/month.  To save $10/month, having an occasional video freeze that took only a couple seconds to catch up was a very minor inconvenience indeed.  768k was ALMOST good enough.  I had no doubt that 3.0, almost four times that speed, would be more than sufficient.

    So I’ve been intending for some time to go for the 3.0 and pay the extra $10.  Friday, I finally got the time to call AT&T and spend the hour on the phone with them to set things up.  They sold me the U-Verse package with phone and Internet only.  This is the deal I got:

Service        Current            U-Verse   
Phone        $42.55/mo        $35/mo
Voice Mail      8.45              included
Comment:    Current phone service is for local calling only, no tolls, no long distance.  The U-Verse phone will not only include voice mail but also unlimited long distance. 

Internet        $19.95/mo        $24.95/mo
Comment:    Current DSL speed is 768 kb.  U-Verse Internet speed will be 12.0 megabits (over 15x the speed I have now).  The price is good for one year, then $48/mo after that. 

Modem        $100 wireless         $100 wireless
Comment:    Initial modem provided for free.  New modem will also be free. 

Service Call    $75            $75
Comment:    This time, they will give me a $100 Visa card to pay for the service call. 

So my current bill has been $70.95 for basic phone service with voice mail and 768k Internet. The new U-Vverse service will be $59.95/ mo for unlimited long distance on phone (I can now fire Sienna Communications, which has been giving me problems for some time now) and a 12.0 Internet connection. 

The only hitch:
    The soonest they can get a tech out to install the new equipment is Friday December 16th.  I have an appointment on that date from 1-3 p.m.  So I have to wait a month to get my new Internet service installed.  I have no doubt that I could call Comcast right now and they would match this deal and have a tech out to install the service on Monday or Tuesday.  But here’s the thing:  I’ve spent hours on the phone with Comcast in the last several weeks just trying to get the autopay shut off on my account so that we can close the Ruth Trust at Merrill Lynch, which I’ve kept open solely for the purpose of servicing these autopays, which I’ve elected not to activate on the Successor Trust.  Hours on hold just to shut off the bill paying service.  Hours spent over a period of weeks to do something that should have taken only a few minutes.  I finally did reach them today and got through in just a few minutes this time and, as always, the CSR was quite rude to me. 

The customer rep at AT&T came on the line in just a couple minutes today, and was very helpful and very pleasant and spent 40 minutes with me to be sure I was completely satisfied.  And when I called them a while back to change the autopay for them too, they came on and settled the problem in just a couple minutes too.  AT&T’s customer service has always been sterling in my experience.  Comcast sucks! 

So yes.  I’d rather wait four more weeks to get my Internet from AT&T than to spend even one more minute dealing with Comcast customer service.  I’ve waited four years to upgrade my Internet, I can wait four more weeks if that’s what it takes to avoid Comcast.  I will likely be in my new house by the time the year is up and can start all over again when that happens. 

Here’s an interesting sidebar for you techies.  The one criticism the cable companies have always leveled against AT&T is the fact that they continue to use the very outdated technology of their old copper wiring infrastructure for their Internet and TV, which is the reason they gave as to why cable was so superior.  Personally, I never saw a difference and have always been satisfied that I have the same quality of service as cable, having had ample opportunity to compare both.  The only difference I ever saw was slower download times on DSL, something I always knew was an issue with DSL.  I didn’t care about that since I did so little downloading.  For only $20/month (compared to almost triple that for cable modem), I certainly didn’t care. 

The AT&T rep now tells me that they are no longer using copper wiring but have converted the whole system to fiber optics, thereby making it as good or better than cable.  As for downloads, they’ve also vastly improved their technology in the last few years.  Upstreams and downstreams are now handled through two separate pipelines so there’s no interference at all.  Downloading now should be just as efficient as with cable. 

I guess I’ll find out in about a month.  Whatever … I KNOW that AT&T customer service is a heckuva lot better than Comcast. 

Anyway, to paraphrase Captain Kirk, "Welcome to the 21st Century!"