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One trick for better AT&T support here on the Peninsula may be to sign up through Sonic instead of directly with AT&T. In some areas like SF, Sonic runs their o

One trick for better AT&T support here on the Peninsula may be to sign up through Sonic instead of directly with AT&T. In some areas like SF, Sonic runs their own fiber, in others they are an AT&T reseller - with the wrinkle that Sonic handles all support with their own local staff. I have been told that they have better insight and connections into the internal AT&T systems than AT&T's own support team. I haven't had much need for support, so I can't vouch for that, but it wouldn't surprise me. I'm in Flood Triangle (between Menlo Oaks and 101), and AT&T ran fiber though our neighborhoods last year. I had good Comcast service, at least after I reported some intermittent outages and they finally sent someone out to test the connection and he said "I'm surprised you're getting any service at all! Your drop has been spliced a few times. I'm calling my buddy with a bucket truck and we will run you a new drop." (A "drop" is the cable that connects your home to the main cable line.) After that it was solid. Had gigabit downloads, but uploads were limited to 30 megabit. Comcast is in a bind here, as they built out their infrastructure in an era of "on-demand television" where download speed was the important thing and upload was just a simple control channel. So they have hardware filters everywhere to separate the upload and download frequencies, and naturally they gave more spectrum to the downloads. In my work I often need to upload large files of 15GB or more. So when AT&T came through I signed up and it is a huge difference: ten minutes to upload one of those files instead of two hours (with people waiting on it).

khuey 4y ago
> One trick for better AT&T support here on the Peninsula may be to sign up through Sonic instead of directly with AT&T. In some areas like SF, Sonic runs their own fiber, in others they are an AT&T reseller - with the wrinkle that Sonic handles all support with their own local staff. I have been told that they have better insight and connections into the internal AT&T systems than AT&T's own support team. I haven't had much need for support, so I can't vouch for that, but it wouldn't surprise me. My experience buying DSL from Sonic about a decade ago in San Francisco is that if you run into a problem with AT&T equipment (e.g. lines upstream from the point where POTS enters your building) you're just done because Sonic won't actually get AT&T to fix their stuff. I was never able to get more than 1Mbps down and eventually just quit and switched to Comcast.
inferiorhuman 4y ago
Like the other person who replied: hard disagree. When I first tried to get Sonic ADSL in San Francisco there was a multiplexer on the line (no 56k, no DSL). Lots and lots and lots of calls with Sonic later and they threw their hands up and told me to deal with AT&T myself. In the end what worked was going into the PacBell/SBC/AT&T direct support forum on dslreports.com and having one of those techs prod the bitchy bell into disconnecting the multiplexer. Nothing I've seen since then suggests that Sonic has any more sway over AT&T these days. In fact if you get the resold AT&T service from Sonic you still have to rent the AT&T dongle and use the AT&T DNS servers.

khuey 4y ago

> One trick for better AT&T support here on the Peninsula may be to sign up through Sonic instead of directly with AT&T. In some areas like SF, Sonic runs their own fiber, in others they are an AT&T reseller - with the wrinkle that Sonic handles all support with their own local staff. I have been told that they have better insight and connections into the internal AT&T systems than AT&T's own support team. I haven't had much need for support, so I can't vouch for that, but it wouldn't surprise me. My experience buying DSL from Sonic about a decade ago in San Francisco is that if you run into a problem with AT&T equipment (e.g. lines upstream from the point where POTS enters your building) you're just done because Sonic won't actually get AT&T to fix their stuff. I was never able to get more than 1Mbps down and eventually just quit and switched to Comcast.

inferiorhuman 4y ago

Like the other person who replied: hard disagree. When I first tried to get Sonic ADSL in San Francisco there was a multiplexer on the line (no 56k, no DSL). Lots and lots and lots of calls with Sonic later and they threw their hands up and told me to deal with AT&T myself. In the end what worked was going into the PacBell/SBC/AT&T direct support forum on dslreports.com and having one of those techs prod the bitchy bell into disconnecting the multiplexer. Nothing I've seen since then suggests that Sonic has any more sway over AT&T these days. In fact if you get the resold AT&T service from Sonic you still have to rent the AT&T dongle and use the AT&T DNS servers.