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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