The Observation Deck

Hello.

I have cox as my ISP right now. $25/month for the value package. Slightly faster than dial-up... We all see the SBC DSL adds. I can get the Pro package for $18/month with (upto) 3meg connection for 1 year.

Couple concerns I have are:
Signing up for a year contract.
Actual speeds.
Availablity of service.

I admit cox is pricey, but it has never gone out on me. Phone service has. When it rains in Lkwd, seems we always lose power or phone service...

When I've called cox to tell them I'm considering changing to a cheaper and faster service, they don't care. They won't even talk about price matching or anything. The person at cox has been trained to simply say cable is faster - um, well not really, not always. What a raquet. Who do we thank for that?...

So, what's your experience with DSL here in Lakewood? What package do you have? Go to DSLReports.com and run their test. What speeds are you really getting opposed to advertised?

Thanks.

Sue

I had SBC until about a yr ago and it was a nightmare. My dad and a couple friends still have it and it continually goes offline. I am not an expert in computers so it is possible that all of us are doing something wrong. I switched to Cox and although it is more (I pay $39 for the faster) I never have any problems and it is easy to setup.

I cannot stand companies that are not confident in their product enough to allow you to go month to month. If it really is great you would never switch!

Good luck with your decision!

There is a prior thread on this issue you can probably get more info from. My experience seems to be contrary to others', but I have never had any problem with SBC DSL. Been on it a bit less than a year.

Hii, just a couple of things to factor in.

Yes, you have to sign a contract for the DSL service. If you don't like the service, it's still $175 or whatever to get out of the contract. They do not negotiate on that point.

You also have to keep your existing phone service with SBC, ATT, whoever they are now. You can't dump your landline (as I have) or go VoIP. Keeping their phone subscriber base from continuing to erode is one of the phone company's strategies with the low price.

SBC/ATT tech support is now all offshore.

DSL is not a regulated public utilitiy (nor is cable internet). ATT has to jump through some customer-service regulatory hoops on its phone service but not on DSL.

Your DSL speed will depend largely on where you are in relation to the phone company's central office, which is across from the westerly apts on Detroit. If you are more than 3000 feet away, don't expect the 3 mb they promise.

As you can probably tell, I am a disgrunted former subscriber. I now have cable (on the gold coast, it's Adelphia, not Cox) and am much more pleased. Others have had better experiences, I know.

I had DSL (SBC) at home when it was first available. I was REALLY dissatisfied. It was so unreliable I maintained a backup dialup ISP. Left for Cox 3 years ago, and haven't had a drop since, although they really do gouge(extra charge for each computer on a home wiFi!).

On the other hand.....since my business did not have Cox cable, and at the time Cox didn't offer business service, when my office upgraded to broadband/wifi, 2 years ago, I went with SBC, mostly for price, I'm not data heavy. Really haven't had any problems, nine to five.

I conclude that SBC/ATT service must have improved since its first generation. In fact, as cox continues to increase the cost, I'm considering taking the house back to DSL.

Jeff

We have Cox both at home and at work. Like Jeff, we had DSL at work for years because Cox wasn't available for business for awhile. I realized I was waiting to get home to do the heavy downloads and I realized that something was wrong with that picture.

However, DSL is significantly less and I think about transferring back now as my clients are starting to have very positive experiences with it. However, it is very easy to get technical support from Cox and they are great. I haven't had such positive experiences with SBC - however we are normally trying to do more complicated things with the Internet for clients.

OK now I'm annoyed. We got on the $29.95 a month plan with SBC a year ago. Now, apparently we're in month 13 because the new price is $50 a month. Talk about dirty pool. I'm glad I use my own domain for webmail and not sbcglobal.net because we can change broadband providers without disruption.

I hate to sound like I'm becoming a redneck, as in "you can tell your a redneck if yhe velvet paintings in your house were bought from an art dealer on the side of the highway." ...but seriously...my last call to SBC tech support was over an hour and a half long mainly trying to get someone in India or Pakistan or thereabouts to understand english.

I've far from a bigot, but to spend more than 15 minutes on just obtaining my account due to my last name being what it is, it gets old.

It's probably as bad as trying to quit AOL!

My MIL wanted to change to SBC (at least for a year) and asked me to help her. I spent over 30 minutes on the phone trying to get them to let her go, so I watched the news story about the man who taped his phone call with them with sympathy.

They wanted my MIL to have a two week cooling off period - and told me that I should call back after that to reconfirm that I really wanted to quit!

It's bad enough that most customer service people have a book in front of them and if your problem varies from what the book says, they try to transfer you around the world several times and steal hours of your time.

"Customer service" or what passes for it is another thread entirely.

There are a lot of other services that will hook you up with DSL that aren't Cox or AT&T. They run on the AT&T lines, but they seem to do a MUCH better job.

quitting AOL is WAY worse. I did that many years ago and it was darn near impossible. When we called SBC they offered us $26.95 for 12 months which we took. Because as I have said we have had no problems with SBC DSL. But you would think they could find a better way to encourage our repeat business.....

Just switched over to Cox HSI, from SBC DSL.

I have their top-tier package (9mbps down/1mbps up), which is MUCH faster than SBC's 6mbps. Seems to have lower latency, too.

Also, for the same price I was paying SBC for phone and DSL ($120/month), I can have digital cable, faster internet, and telephone (my phone service is VOIP from Packet8, $20/mo).

EDIT: Just did a speed test, it's showing 7mbps down/1mbps up.