I’ve had cable internet (Spectrum) since I moved to NC almost two years ago but it’s bad and getting worse. It’s irritating when I lose the feed streaming a baseball game or whatever, but now that I’m working from home and depend on being connected for my job, it’s beyond irritating. AT&T Fiber is available at my place and is faster than Spectrum, but the reliability is my main concern/reason for switching. When it works, Spectrum is plenty fast, but there are too many times I get dumped and can’t get back in. Including this morning.
My girlfriend has T-Mobile 5G internet and seems to like it, but again I’m concerned about the reliability. So those seem to be my options other than Spectrum.
I had ATT fiber installed about a month ago when our house was finished. I was planing on going with Ozarks Go but they couldn’t get installed for 6-8 weeks. I work out of the house and couldn’t do that so I chose ATT fiber. They got out here and installed it fast enough and promised me 1 gig speed but I’ve never had better than about 520 mbps. A technician is coming out today to try to fix it. They can either discount me back to what they can deliver or I will call Ozarks Go and switch when they can install. Any phone call to ATT is worse than a root canal.
On another note, this website isn’t very reliable on the technology side. I frequently have to close it out and log back in. Not saying it’s your responsibility - just commenting on reliability.
Interesting. I’m on 200 mbps plan with Spectrum. At midnight last night it was running a little faster than that, but frequently it’s around 40 mbps. Which I can live with if it’s steady. But as I noted, it drops me a lot, just like my cell phone used to do in Houston. I can’t live with 0 mbps.
I’m thinking I’ll go with the 300 mbps plan with AT&T, which is plenty fast for my needs. And $30 a month cheaper.
I hear ya about the phone calls = root canal. But that’s true with anyone. Certainly has been true with Spectrum on my numerous attempts to find out why my Wifi keeps going out.
Swine, this piqued my interest, because I’ve recently seen the T-Mobile ads and at $50 a month, it looks attractive.
I would assume the speed and reliability depend on where you are using it - as mobile phone usage does. Wondering about your comment that you are “concerned about the reliability”, since your GF apparently already has it. What has her experience been…has it cut out on her? Does the speed fluctuate a lot? I worry about those issues too…but I don’t have anyone who has the service that i can ask those question to. You do, so I’m curious what her real world experience with that product has been.
Also…do they slow service down at certain levels of usage (again, as most mobile carriers do)?
@youdaman has blazing fast speed, internet speed that is, lol. Sometimes, he would have time to comment during games before I would even see the action in my old house.
Her usage pattern is a lot different than mine (it shouldn’t be very different, but it is; that’s a whole 'nother story). She mainly streams YouTube videos to her TV, isn’t on many websites beyond Amazon Shopping. So I don’t know if she has interruptions that she just doesn’t know about because she’s not online that much. She says her YouTube streams are okay though.
And to further reinforce my problem, it took me about five tries to post this reply because I kept getting dumped out of Wifi. I’ve submitted the order to AT&T (using my phone). They’ll get me installed next week.
I’ve told this story before, but I think it applies here. During the 2007 LSU game (3 OT at Baton Rouge) my parents came over to watch the game at my place (we had cable). My son, who tends to be a loner to the extreme, holed up in his room instead of watching in the living room with the rest of us, but he was watching the game too.
Get to the third OT, and LSU’s trying for the 2-point conversion to force OT #4. We hear “Interception!” coming from my son’s room. It was at least 5 seconds, maybe 10, before we saw the pick on the TV in the living room. Same cable coming into the same apartment, yet he saw it 5-10 seconds before we did.
Which is to say that there’s more than internet speed involved here.
I have ATT&T fiber, don’t have any problems with getting dropped. The big difference for me is not so much downloading speeds, but uploading. If you have to send out big files, the difference in upload speeds is incredible. Watching movies or TV is usually fine, but watching sports can be a little choppy. That may be my computer though. Watching streaming or over the air HD antenna is always 5 to 10 seconds faster than U-verse.
I have ATT Fiber here in Barling/Fort Smith area and its blazing fast for only 55 bucks a month. I do a ton of online stuff and always have many things running at once. I’ve had 2 different games streaming at the same time on my dual monitor and never had any problems. Most times while I’m streaming the baseball games, I’m online gaming and posting in thread on the hog boards. Never had any problems with it except on the ESPN side of things. Each time I must log out and log back in to begin a new game. But I suspect that has something to do more with the VPN stuff I got going on than ESPN. Anyways ATT Fiber is great. I’ll not go back to cable ever or sat ever. Fiber Optic is the way to go.
Jeff, I have ATT fiber at home and it works fine for me. I use my laptop for EMR stuff, wife watches movies and shows on TV steaming and sports are great on it. No issues with speed or reliability. My boys chew up data when they are home and still no issues.
Thanks for the input, gang. I went ahead and ordered it. Install is not until next week and I’ve already had to reset my router twice tonight I ordered 300 mbps, which is more than I was getting from Spectrum for less money (and no price hike in a year).
Dave, if T-Mobile had been the only other option available, I would have gone with it based on the GF’s experience. But I’m more comfortable with fiber right now than 5G, and it’s kind of a big deal if I can’t get online and do my job. I’m not overloaded with work at the moment, but that may change very soon.
Last month First Electric install fiber in the rural area I live in. The internet service is called Connect 2 First and it’s fast with no buffering.
We have 5 TV in house and 2 laptops and still haven’t had any issues. During the last lightning storm we still had the our internet. To heck with dish and direct TV.
Got AT&T one gig fiber internet as soon as it was available in my neighborhood in LR almost four years ago. Everything is buried and the only problems I have had is the inside connection had to be redone once. The fiber works fine. AT&T wanted $95 per month but there is a reseller called Toast.net that sells it to me for $85 per month. Not cheap but I have to do a cloud backup every night of my hard drive so I need a large capacity to hold that under an 2-3 hours. My office is in my house so we share this fiber with the house and we have never had a streaming or Roku problem at all.
I have a question: why were the baseball games fuzzy on ESPN plus early in the season and crystal clear from like April 1 on? Would that have been my fiber optics speed (it’s the new NEXT from my rural co-op) or were they having trouble at UA early in season?
The ATT tech came out yesterday. He was a really nice guy. Why can’t their internal people be as nice?!?!? He determined my speed at the gateway is as promised. I had 970 mbps download and 960 mbps upload. Then, we talked about all the things that slow that speed down in my house like wireless extenders, devices that are older and don’t have that capability, etc. Swine alluded to it earlier. My main TV is just fine because it’s newer but some of the other things aren’t. Over time, they will all get upgraded. I’m due for a PC upgrade sometime this year anyway.
Ritter Communications was running fiber out near the cabin. Now that will be a huge upgrade out there. I just need to figure out how to get them to run it the rest of the way.
Bingo on older devices Q. The boys were home for Christmas and spring break, and had no trouble playing online PlayStation gaming with their brother and other friends. My new iPad is fast, but our older desktop is slower downloading stuff.
