Very poor service lately?

[MrLost]

This started about mid Feb of this year. Ive been a customer for over a year and a half and didnt have a single issue up until Feb. Thats when the you know what hit the fan.

My internet has gotten progressively slower since that point and at one point i was running a speedtest.net test and had .32mbps download and like .17 upload...im paying for 1.5mbps as its the fastest i can get due to the poor lines in the area. Before feb i could easily achieve 1.3 mbps download and 6-700kbs up all day long even at peak hours!!! I was a happy customer then...

it now takes a good 20 minutes to get a netflix video buffered enough to play the movie all the way through or even a 3 second youtube clip of a show (literally 3 second soundclip with a still image) takes over a minute to buffer/load after it immediately plays one second. Ive noticed it seems to quickly load and buffer about the first 10% of ANY movie THEN it literally freezes. The buffer bar just stops dead, video plays up until then and buffers/loads for a very very long time. Its like im being capped off and whatever monitoring software catches it spike up when downloading media and cuts it off bad.

I DO NOT have cable or sat TV as they are even more money pits so i use netflix and watch videos online alot but currently ATT is making this very hard and frustrating. What wonder they are hated by alot of thier customers.

To top it all off they increased my bill i am paying $38/mo for .3mbps download! I am NOT a happy customer and trying to warn everyone i can to avoid ALL ATT services. Id rather duke it out with comcast internet than ATT...

I have tried calling customer support with no help, the robot that took a good 30 minutes to finaly tell me there were errors on the line and that "he" cleared them and to me reset my modem and call back. well of course it didnt work in the long term and im not about to waste more of my wireless minutes on this company (i have US Cellular btw). Since i didnt buy thier garbage of a modem (yea im going to pay over $100 for your $30 modem i can get from newegg...) they refuse to help me.

Im sure my rant wont get anywhere but it seems im not alone with terrible service starting earlier this year reading the hundreds of complaint postings...

[MrLost]

Reading some other users complaints i noticed a user was running a continuous ping and watching it. I too have done this (pinging google, whatever the closest google server is to me) and noticed large chunks of requests timed out... reaing this forum and a few others (unrelated topics) it stayed steady, as soon as i opened netflix, youtube, discovery channels website, in otherwords any site that is video or graphic heavy (ie alot of downloading)  it hoses up  all over. While playing a video im getting ping anywhere from 14 to 175... Ping gets high then times out...too many time outs and it just freezes the video...

[dl40dl]

Mr Lost-

I too have been experiencing similar slow down issues, I pay for 3 mbps but rarely achieve that sustained level.  I will tell you that twice a technician has been to my house and found that the external wire from the junction to my house was severely damaged, they thought an animal had chewed on the line.  The first time the technician repaired the line, but last week when I lost signal again, the technician replaced the entire line and no longer has it running through a tree providing easy access to animals.  MY service is now faster but still rarely meets the 3 mbps I pay for.  Just thought I would share my story, it might be a problem with the line?

Good luck.

[spd2demun ACE - Master]

Contact Alex:

Alex

---

dl40dl wrote:

Mr Lost-

I too have been experiencing similar slow down issues, I pay for 3 mbps but rarely achieve that sustained level.  I will tell you that twice a technician has been to my house and found that the external wire from the junction to my house was severely damaged, they thought an animal had chewed on the line.  The first time the technician repaired the line, but last week when I lost signal again, the technician replaced the entire line and no longer has it running through a tree providing easy access to animals.  MY service is now faster but still rarely meets the 3 mbps I pay for.  Just thought I would share my story, it might be a problem with the line?

Good luck.

---

[MrLost]

i have, no response yet... must be M-F 9-5 guy

or like everyone else with ATT they dont care about one guy, they get thier money from corporate contracts just like majority of service companies.

[spd2demun ACE - Master]

Off on weekends.   You should get a reply around Mon.

---

MrLost wrote:

i have, no response yet... must be M-F 9-5 guy

or like everyone else with ATT they dont care about one guy, they get thier money from corporate contracts just like majority of service companies.

---

[pj_5150]

Spoiler

I have the exact same problem, here in East Peoria, IL. Around late February, my Internet connection went from great to bad. It's like the AT&T side keeps timing out. I have all the speed that I always had, but I have to constantly push the F5 button on my keyboard to refresh websites. Only a little loads at a time, with these constant "timeouts."  AT&T customer service never did resolve the problem. The problem is definitely on their side, because I even bought a new modem and the same thing happens––full Internet speed with constant dropouts (but never a broken connection).

[NICOLNNNNNNNNNN…]

I have had ATT for years and it had disintegrated int the absolute worst. My connection speed is so slow it is almost unuseable.

No point in trying anything streaming video or audio.

But to top themselves, my service drops every 2 two minutes on average. Worst of all I pay money for this.

I called ATT but the guy was in India but totally clueless.

[dap0319]

I've been an att customer for 3 years and up until a few months ago I really didn't have a lot of complaints.  Then a few months ago I started having more and more problems with my internet.  But to be honest the problems I encountered with the internet were nothing compared to the problems I started having with customer service.  In the past few months I have spent literally hours on the phone with tech support and "customer service" and even the retention center and the attitudes I got ranged from completely incompetent to they just did not care.  For 3 months I made one call after another because my router would continually reset to a point where my internet was unreliable and almost unusable.  I was told over and over by tech support it must be my router and I'd have to buy a new one for $100 (the one I had was just over a year old).  Then I found out they changed their wifi protocol but did not upgrade the software for the router.  After 3 months of fighting with them they finally sent me a new router and then acted like they were doing me a huge favor and I should be ever so grateful to them. 

Last week I even brought up to a woman in the retention center all of the complaints on these boards about customer service.  After being told how I shouldn't complain because for a couple years the service was good, she then told me how all of the complaints here didn't matter because a lot of people were happy with their service.  I wish I was making that up.

I guess I should say I WAS an att customer for 3 years.  After that phone call I started looking for a new internet providor.  I swore I'd never in my life go back to Comcast but the customer service I have gotten from att over the last few months drove me back to Comcast.  By the end of that day I had signed back up with Comcast.  I am not asking for perfection and I'm not looking for anything free.  But I will not pay for a service thats not reliable or almost unusable and then deal with incompetence and worse yet, completely not caring.  I hope service for ya'll gets better, I really do.  But I have to say I doubt it will as I couldn't get any of the supervisors I spoke with to be able to explain to me why I should be willing to recommend att over other ISP's, nor could I get anyone to explain to me what was being done to make the customer service better.  After all, all the complaints don't matter because a lot of people don't complain about it.  Never mind a lot do.  Peace to ya'll but I'm out.

[phade2blaq]

Join the club ! I have fast access 3.0 and my speed never comes anywhere near often resembing a dial up connection at times !

[ATTAlexCM]

Thank you for sharing your recent experiences. I'm sorry to hear about the trouble. For assistance with account specific questions/concerns, please send me a Private Message (click hyperlink to send me a PM) with your name, account number, phone number and the best time to contact you.  We'll get you in touch with the group that can look into it.  I'm closing this thread for now since this has been thoroughly discussed.  We appreciate your participation.

*To send a private message, you can either click on the link in this message or click on the little blue envelope in the upper right hand corner, click "compose new message" and type my username in the "Send To" field.

Regards,

Alex