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AT&T vs TimeWarner
BrainPaint
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey so I just got a job in Austin Texas! We have found an apartment and have set everything up except for the internet which has two options: AT&T or Time Warner. Here in Baltimore we have been forced to use Comcast which is awful. I didn't even know until we looked it up for comparison that AT&T and Time Warner offer plans with 18+ Mbps for about $50/month while I've been paying the same price for Comcast's 6Mbps. Rubbish. Anyway, can't seem to figure out which is the better option. AT&T is $10 cheaper a month and offers 18Mbps while Time Warner offers 20Mbps. I'm not sure if there is a big difference between DSL and cable internet (at least I haven't had any problems working with either) so if anyone knows anything that will tip the scale for me, I am all ears!
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I can't imagine that there will be that big a difference in performance between 18 and 20Mbps unless you are a competitive gamer. What's a few extra seconds to get a website to load if it saves you $120 a year?
Personally I use cable internet for the sole fact that Rogers gave me a discount rate for bundling the service with my phone service. I have never had any problems with it aside from one time where cable lines in the area got knocked out by a storm and nobody had access for the day while they fixed it.
Generally I would always pick cable over DSL, just because at face value it should be far more reliable. That doesn't mean it will be fore that very specific location though.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
For me, AT&T is much better service overall. Time Warner just...meh.
Also I believe AT&T is far cheaper, especially if you're only doing single-service.
Personally I'd take a ~2Mbps hit for $10/mo.
You probably had a serious line fault.
Not that that excuses them, but DSL reliability depends a lot more on the age and length of the copper back to the exchange than anything your ISP can control.
They claimed the exchange was only a few hundred feet from my apartment at the time, but that aside, their service guys were the worst I've ever dealt with - they never even showed up on the same day they were scheduled, let alone hitting the 4 hour window, and they'd leave voicemails bitching me out for not letting them in the building when I was at work. It was a bad experience for more reasons than just unreliable service. I don't know anything about time warner, but I can say from experience that I'd prefer Comcast over at&t dsl (I'm not a fan of Comcast either, but I do believe them to be less bad for this comparison).
If it were my house, I'd check to see if Fios or Uverse were available before going with cable or dsl.
Dissatisfied AT&T customer, would never do business again, etc. etc.
Thus far, I'm under the impression that OP is talking about getting AT&T high speed dsl. Completely different service from AT&T U-Verse.
I think it actually doesn't have a cap, just their DSL service.
DSL is nice in theory because it's a dedicated line (and some companies basically let you decide how much bandwidth you want to buy and always have access to), but in practice there's just a lot that can go wrong and suddenly throttle your connection. Plus, in my experience, you just end up paying more for DSL and getting about equivalent speed (but of course a hopeful sales rep will talk-up the dedicatedness of it, and how it's your own personal line and all that nonsense).
EDIT: Just for clarity - a 'dedicated line' is the right term, but the term can be misleading. That doesn't mean that they have physically laid down fibre just for you - it means that within the fibre network they have laid down, specific bandwidth real-estate within that network is assigned to your account. You are literally (in theory, anyway) renting 'X' amount of bandwidth space for 'X' dollars.
Cable, like everyone else has said, carries a lot of bandwidth - so instead of assigning specific amounts to customers, the cable company just says, "The amount of data our cables can transfer in this area is arbitrarily large. You are paying for access to this arbitrarily large data capacity, and you can expect 'X' bandwidth to be available to you at any given moment,"
Even when they start announcing neighborhoods, though, expect an even longer wait on fiber than you would for cable or DSL. No infastructure = fucking long wait.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
Actually, it depends.
If you have internet only, even if it's AT&T U-Verse high speed internet, it's still DSL.
Actually, it's all DSL. U-Verse just uses a newer VDSL system.
But, yeah...
I'll just throw in that we're moving this week and switching to AT&T U-verse after having Time Warner for the last 11 years. We didn't have any complaints about TW, but we were looking to upgrade our TV and internet, and the pricing structure for that stuff with TW is ridiculous. We're also supposed to get a free Nexus 7 from signing up for certain packages, so there's that. I think that only applies to bundles, though. They're coming out to the new house on Friday to set it up, so I can report back with initial impressions.
There's also Grande Communications and Doublehorn Communications if you want some other alternatives, but I can't speak to their service.
I have Uverse and it does have a cap. But maybe it varies by area.
I doubt I would ever hit the cap though. Streaming Netflix and Hulu and downloading the occasional game on the Xbox is how I use mine though.
No, my understanding is that U-Verse has a cap, but they never enforce it. AT&T's standalone DSL service also has a lower cap, which absolutely is enforced.
Also, I have to say again that with 2 people streaming Netflix/Hulu we were hitting the 150 GB cap pretty often. U-Verse's cap is 250 GB, but again, I've heard they don't even bother about it.
@Sir%20Carcass thanks for all your info on Austin so far! If you hit any snags with at&t please let us know. Move-in is set for august 8th so we still have a little time.
Our installation took maybe 30 minutes, and that was for internet, TV, and phone. What helped was the fact that the previous owners had U-verse installed as well, so he didn't have to wire the house with their stuff. Otherwise, it would've taken at least a couple of hours, and as many as four.
So far the service has been good. Our advertised speed is 18mbps and speedtest.net just gave me 16.8. They give you the info to log into the router to change whatever settings you want, so I was able to easily turn their router into a bridge so that my network could do its own thing. Their stuff consists of a big ass cubic backup battery, a router, and a WAP. That's for U-verse, anyway. Not sure about their regular DSL service. Their wireless access point worked right out of the box for my wife's laptop.
I guess that's all I can think of. Let me know if you have any questions about it. I've had it for a very brief period of time, but so far I'm more impressed than I was with Time Warner.
But you'd have to turn QoS for those things waaaaay down to see any appreciable increase in your speed, and you'd notice the lower quality on the other two services much sooner and more severely.
I'm connected through wifi and there are other people in the house watching tv/netflix/etc. The tv feed shouldn't be cutting into anyone's interweb bandwidth - if I recall correctly, there's supposed to be something like 10Mb or so on top of your internet bandwidth to be used exclusively by your set top boxes.