After yet another horrible customer service experience, I quickly dropped Suddenlink last week. Now that DSL is available in the neighborhood, Suddenlink is no longer the only high speed Internet available. Quick Summary of the transition:
DirecTV
Ordered on Thursday night and installer came Monday at 11 a.m. Install of dish and 5 receivers took ~4 hours. Installer used most of what was already pre-wired in the house, except for one additional cable line run to my one TV that was to get a HD DVR installed. FYI, the HD DVR was $99/extra and the additional cable run and outlet was $50. Otherwise the install was “free” as advertised.
Note, the HD DVR provided has two problems (by design) you may want to be aware of. The first is that they no longer include an over the air tuner. Without this, you are unable to record HD content from KXAN which does not allow DirecTV to rebroadcast it’s HD signal. You can record the SD feed (boring) or use your TVs HD tuner if it has one, but you must watch it live. This is only mildly frustrating because DTV’s previous DVR had this feature and they pulled it out to save a few bucks. The COX/Suddenlink HD DVR did not have it ever, so it’s not as if I lost something here. The second problem is that the DVR only buffers one channel at a time. Although it has two tuners and you can record two shows at a time, you can not flip back and forth between the two and fast-forward/rewind them. Each time you switch, the buffer is completely dropped and the tuner you change to starts building a buffer of its own all over again. What does this mean? Ever watch a show a few minutes behind and want to switch to another channel briefly, but plan on coming back? With the COX/Suddenlink HD DVR you could pause what you were watching, switch tuners, switch back and pick up where you left off. Not with DTV. Once you switch, anything it had saved between where you were and real time gets dropped. When you switch back, you’re now at real time, not where you left off. Some of you have no idea what I’m talking about and that’s a good thing! Some of you, though, are pro TV watchers like me and this comes as a big disappointment.
Other than these two concerns, I’m happy with DTV. It’s nice to have ESPN2 and FSN in HD finally and I got to check out the Houston Texans on the NFL Network Thursday.
AT&T DSL
Ordered on Monday night and hardware was delivered on Wednesday. I ended up getting a bad modem, so it wasn’t until the next Monday that I got up and running. Despite some in the neighborhood having problems with 6MPS, mine has been running perfectly for the first week at least. A few checks showed roughly 20% improvement on overall latency compared to Suddenlink and zero packet loss (unlike 20-30% at times by Suddenlink). Halo is playable again (er, and spreadsheets from work download faster, or something…). Interestingly, this is the first experience I’ve had with AT&T Customer Support in years and they are exponentially better than they were back then! Having serious competition inspired change, I suppose. Someone should tell Suddenlink.
Josh D
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8 comments:
Suddenlink was down for 2+ hours this morning, and it has us seriously considering moving to AT&T. I called to get more information, and was told that, in addition to the 3 packages offered in the mailing we got recently (Basic, Express, & Professional). There is also an Elite, package.
The Basic offers "13x faster than dial-up" at $14.99/mo; the Express offers "25x faster than dial-up" at $19.99/mo; the Pro package offers "50x faster than dial-up" at $24.99/mo; and the Elite offers 2x faster than the Professional package at $34.99/mo.
This all seems pretty nebulous to me. The woman I talked to couldn't put the "faster than dial-up" speeds into more meaningful terms, so its hard to know which package will be the best value.
Does anyone know what the actual bit-rate speed is for these packages? Josh, which package did you elect?
--Rusty A.
I got Elite, which is 6Mbps. Others in our neighborhood said they've had problems staying connected with the 6Mbps package so they downgraded, but I have not had any problems yet. I need to test my speed, though, to see if I'm actually getting that much. Will tonight.
FWIW, I doubt many would find much difference between 3Mbps and 6Mbps unless you frequently download enormous files. Most online videos play fluidly at 1Mbps (and don’t get better after that) and if you only download 1-2MB size files you're talking a difference of 1-2 seconds for each. Even then, you're often bottlenecked at the SOURCE anyway.
I went with 6Mbps for gaming. If you're not into that, you may want to save the $10/month and go with a lesser package.
FWIW, though Suddenlink was capable of peaking at 8-12 Mbps, I never saw ours go above 4 or 5 even with their best package.
Also, Suddenlink took another hit this weekend when they had to take KXAN (NBC) off of their network because KXANs owner (LIN TV) is holding out for more money. So if you’re still with Suddenlink and want to watch The Office, you’ll have to break out the rabbit ears. LIN TV is in the wrong here in my opinion, but bottom line is that Suddenlink is yet again deficient in the services they provide and don’t seem all that concerned that they’re losing more customers. It was interesting that when I canceled, I was never asked why.
As of 7 pm tonight, I'm getting ~5 Mbps down and 440kbps up.
You can test your own at
http://www.speedtest.net
Hello all,
We switched to AT&T too for everything, phone, cable TV (Dish Network) and high speed Internet and we have loved every minute of it, even the installation. Usually installations are painful, ours was great and knowing Sudddenlink would no longer be the cause of frustrations, it was glorius.
Fred
One thing that is mitigating my desire to switch (although it is probably inevitable) is the torture that I will face in changing my email address again. When Cox became Suddenlink, that was a disaster for my email account. I am not looking forward to that again anytime soon.
It is for that reason that many use email accounts that are not directly tied to their Internet provider (such as gmail (free) or a personal domain name (as little at $10/year)) and simply forward their provider email to that account or dont use it at all. My Suddenlink account only recieved emails from Suddenlink! I didnt even bother to set up my new AT&T account.
After talking to AT&T Customer Service to get clarification on terms and features, I decided to give AT&T a try. I opted for the Elite package.
Since we have not had residential long-distance service for several years, I had to add AT&T long distance to get the DSL service. They had two options: $2/month plus 10-cents/minute for long-distance calls, or no monthly charge plus 26-cents a minute. I chose the latter since I will continue to make all my long-distance calls on my cell phone.
The Gateway came three days after I ordered. It is a combination router (with five CAT5/6 ports) and wireless router. Installation of the hardware was a no-brainer.
The day after the Gateway arrived, my service was activated. All that was left to do was register online. This was quick and painless.
I am on my second day of service. I don't notice much increase in speed, though downloads of files appear to be faster. But I do notice fewer "glitches" - web pages not loading without a retry, music taking a long time to buffer, or failing to buffer, etc.
I am also successfully using my company's VPN without any problems. If you are having trouble with Suddenlink, AT&T DSL seems to be a good choice to replace them.
I've been using AT&T DSL for about three weeks and for the most part, I am pleased. I have, however, experienced some annoyances that I didn't have with Suddenlink.
The first time I rebooted my system after using the new DSL, I was told by a pop-up box (from the operating system, not IE) that I could connect to this source for 1 month, and then it would expire.) I don't know what casued that, and the month hasn't gone by yet, so I don't know if I am facing future problems or not.
Occasionally (frequently), I get a message in my browser that says:
Success Resolution Successful. The error has been successfully resolved. Please close down your browser and restart it to continue browsing online.
This information is presented on an HTML page which has the AT&T logo at the top. I have no idea what "error" it is talking about, and why AT&T is even monitoring my Internet activity. I never encountered such "errors" with Suddenlink.
Having to close IE and restart it is an annoyance that I don't need, especially since I usually have several web pages open in different tabs.
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