So my landlord (brother) wants to switch from Cox to AT&T because Uverse, unlimited mobile data, blah, blah... Anyway, what convinced him was that apparently AT&T was running fiber in the area. And I was immediately sceptical.
Can someone who knows a little more about this explain it? From what I understand they are just running fiber from the node to your residence instead of copper cable. I was under the impression that the node was part of the bottleneck, not necessarily the degrading copper wires connecting the node to the residence. Am I wrong?
As an aside, Cox has been pretty good about stability and speed, surprisingly. It's more about my brother getting pissed about our wireless network being slow or dropping off because of our use of wireless extenders. I've convinced him that we need to run ethernet, and we'll be doing that regardless of our provider.
Anyway, he still wants to do the Fiber thing because they offered faster speeds and a better price. However it's capped at 50mbps until they "work out the kinks" and they'll offer faster speeds at a later date. I smell a hot pile of BS.
Where's the lie? Or am I just being overly skeptical?
They are full of shit. Their "Internet Preferences" packages was a crock and even their own employees shunned it. From their own service details: "Actual customer speeds may vary and are not guaranteed. Download speeds are typically up to 940Mbps due to overhead capacity reserved to deliver the data." Wat?
Just about all ISPs, especially the major ones monitor your internet usage. They use their own DNS which can and probably will limit certain websites and redirect unresolved requests to their own search engine. I've seen this happen where aliexpress would not resolves at all. They may also give you a router to use with no access to admin.
I have a choice between timewarner/spectrum, consolidated, and ATT among a few others. ATT has fiber here and I still haven't found enough reason to switch. I'd recommend a VPN at the router level If you do, and find a primary/secondary dns of your choosing.
ATT is probably running fiber in your area - that doesn't mean you will get it.
In Connecticut our governor did something enlightened and forced every ISP to provide the entire state with fiber. They did it. I watched with anticipation as Cablevision installed the fiber on my street. I saw the guys in a truck festooned with Optimum Fiber logos run fiber cable into the junction box for our condo, 100 feet away. Where the fiber was converted into copper coax running into our home.
The state of CT is wired for fiber, but our homes aren't. The ISP's won't build the "Last Mile" between the poles in the street and our modems. I suppose if a business wants to pay thousands to complete the connection, it is possible. That was 10 years ago and we are still waiting for that last 100 feet of glass.
These are all fair points. I think I've convinced him to cancel until we finish getting the house wired for Ethernet. And even then, I think he's gonna wait until AT&T can prove they are actually putting in gigabit fiber. Not just this, "50mbps for now, but we're improving our network and we're gonna offer faster speeds soon™"
Besides, I think 180mbps down and 12 up is pretty great. Just gotta get the main router to the center of the house, and get the rest of the rooms wired for ethernet.
In my area they offered it in line with google starting to run fiber, at half the price of google's.
They labeled it as a "promotional upgrade program" and we naturally signed up. No word from at&t for 6 weeks or so, and the deal just sort of evaporated once google stopped rolling out in our area.
It was probably a lie. 2 years at AT&T I've seen countless people told they're getting fiber only to get VDSL. Even if they did get actual 1G fiber I wouldn't do it. Rarely will you ever get more than 4-500 mbps. You can't have a router work well because the modems don't have bridge mode. Just trash all around. Stick with what you got for now unless they make an offer you any refuse.
Yeah, we have a pretty nice wireless router, but it's on one side of the house where my room is because I wanted to have my computers to be connected by ethernet.
Once it's in the center of the house, most of the wireless issues will be resolved. But, we need to wire the house for ethernet so we can put it at the center of the house.
so Uverse is fiber to node, you share that connection with who ever is has uverse in your neighborhood, not sure how many customers each node share but it was about equivalent to comcast speeds. you have to remember that the fiber also delivers cable tv and phone service.
if the price is right and the speeds are on par I don't see it being too bad but proper fiber it isn't.
sidenote, I found you could plug a pc in the cable box ethernet port and bam you're online!
ATT does have issues. No 1 will they maintain the service if they install it. No 2 They tend to use 20 to 21 billing cycles instead of the standard 30 days what does that the price is higher than you think in a monthly cycle you will have 12 bills in a year in 21 day cycle you will have up to 17 payments vrs 12. No 3 yes the will sell your data it will be in bulk hidden groups but they are going to sell it to advisers. so you have to compare all the options kick the tires and see which is the better deal. Oh and I almost forgot You do not own the router/ cable boxes so if you disconnect the service you have to ship the gateway /cable boxes back to ATT through the means of the UPS store. ATT will pay for the shipping however if you do not have one close to you it is something to think about.
The "fiber" that UVERSE uses comes in 2 varieties and I have had experience with both. At my parents house we have the DSL version of UVERSE that has a max speed of 100Mbps down as long as you do NOT subscribe to anything else ATT that comes over the same connection. If you have any other ATT services that come into the house on the same line then the max speed is 50 Mbps. My dad thought that we were going to get actual fiber when the UVERSE system was first coming to the neighborhood when I was in highschool.
The second version of UVERSE available in DFW for certain neighborhoods is full Gigabit speed internet that I had at my apartment when I moved out for college to a new gentrification project in Fort Worth. At that apartment I never had connection problems and never experienced speeds worse than 800Mbps down when hard wired to my router even at peak use times. They called this Giga-power or something stupid like that and as far as I experienced it was full gigabit fiber. The building I lived in was wired for fiber to your individual unit and so far I know of very few other neighborhoods that can get this type of UVERSE unless they are new developments.
My parents have had UVERSE since it was first available at their house and as far as ATT has told them there are no current plans to upgrade the infrastructure to allow the Giga-power speeds in their neighborhood.
This is commonly overlooked in the fiber debate. Yep, it don't mean shit if you've got a bottleneck. Even if they run it up to the home, it still isn't in the home. You'll still be bottlenecked without a direct fiber connection to the modem. Only then would you be limited by your own network's current capabilities (cables, router, WiFi, etc) and I don't see consumer-grade fiber equipment being marketed anytime soon, so while there is a ceiling to the speed one could possibly enjoy, it's an artificial ceiling.
How sad that this is enough to appease yours (and probably America's) internet speed demands.
I had two AT&T reps going door to door in my neighborhood last week telling everyone that AT&T was running “fiber” in the neighborhood. I asked them what kind of down/up speeds we were looking at their reply was 6 mbps down.
Needless to say i laughed in their face and told them to leave. As much as i hate Comcast with a seething rage that satan would be alittle jealous of, i’m not giving up 75 mbps down for 6 mbps with a company that has a reputation just as bad as Comcast.
Perhaps, at those speeds, AT&T could cut cost and maintain their quoted speeds by installing some carrier pigeon cages around the neighboorhood? Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
I’ve been a long time AT&T customer but have been considering moving now that we have WOW! cable in the area. AT&T’s fastest speed in my area is 25/5 which is what I currently have. For what they are charging, WOW claims they can get me 100/10 or much faster if I’m willing to pay more.
I strongly dislike my required AT&T router that they provided me. The wifi is garbage and had died every 6 months requiring AT&T to come out to replace the unit until I got smart and I put it in DMZ mode and put my pfsense router between my network and it. I have my own personal access point and turned off wifi on the AT&T router and have been working well like that for several years now.
AT&T has been saying for years that 1000 fiber is coming soon but it has never actually been available whenever I check. I will believe it when I see it.
Also, does anyone know whats the advantage to bridge mode over DMZ on a cable provided router?