 Review by SYNACK 
UPDATED: 313 days ago
member for 8.6 years, 5026 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Venice,Los Angeles,CA
 Contract price not specified.
 "Consistent speed 24/7, solid connection"
 "tech support"
 "Recommended"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I signed up in late 1997 with MediaONE, before it even became available and was put on a notification list. Over time there were name transitions (M1/RR, ...) and currently it is called ATTBI.
When they finally rolled it out in my neighborhood, they promptly notified me and the install in early 1998 was without problems.
Looking back over the last four years of service, the positive experiences clearly outweigh the few negatives. My caps always was 1500/300 and I can get near these speeds consistently.
No major long outages. Two trouble events with intermittent service were fixed with a replacement modem (1. LanCity (failed), 2. BestData (send levels out of specs causing flaky connection) 3. RCA (no problems since))
At the moment my cost includes $10/month modem rental. I'll probably buy my own soon. I hesitated initially, because modems do seem to fail (see above).
Phone Tech support: The front lines are manned by kids that weed out obvious simple issues, but there is no way to get past them without answering the scripted questions (Is the modem plugged in, how are the lights, what does "winipcfg" show, what is the MAC address and serial number of the modem, you use a router? we don't support that), even if I simply want to notify them that one of their routers or servers has problems. For example once they added a second News server for balancing and a DNS lookup gave one or the other IPs randomly. Unfortunately, they forgot to add our specific subnet to the access list so people from my area had a 50% failure rate connecting. Of course thech support could not reproduce this, because they were coming from a different subnet. After I analyzed the problem (e.g. enter one or the other IP in the news client directly gave a 0% or 100% success rate. I also analyzed the IPs in the news header of all users reporting "problems" vs. "no problems" and it was clear that only the recently added subnet (different class B) was rejected by one of the servers) and told them exactly what the problem was, it took them two days to fix it. On the phone, they addmitted that there was a problem, but they had no idea what it was.
Another time, after I sent them some e-mail headers showing that at times a significant amount of incoming messages were randomly delayed by several hours between two of their internal servers, I got a message back about two weeks later, simply asking if the situation has improved (no acknowledment of a problem).
Most of the time, the online status page did not show any obvious problems, even if there clearly were issues. It seems this has improved recently.
In summary, phone support is marginal and often not worth the wait on hold.
Online Support: The support page also offers online chat support. Overall, I had better luck getting a resonable answer. I would recommend using this over phone support. Nice thing is that you can save a full transcript at the end of the session for your records. If you are on hold, you get a status of how many are in line before you. (Of course the connection needs to be working for this  )
Field Service: All encounters with the field techs have been very positive. They are much more knowledgable than the phone staffers, know what they are doing, and don't waste my time with meaningless questions.
Overall, there was little need for support and the connection was reliable to a large extent. The recent transition to attbi involved an e-mail change and went smooth.
The new attbi e-mail allows up to six additional accounts and all incoming e-mail is filtered by brightmail technology to remove obvious spam. This has worked exceedingly well. You can go online and check the "screened mail" folder. I never had a false positive, but it trapped 90+% of all genuine SPAM. Don't disable this!
Over the following years, the providership changed again, first to Comcast, then to Time Warner and service did not really change much. Basic, reliable service.
***** Well, all things have to come to an end! *****
This spring I noticed some guys on the pole behind the house and they said they are wiring the neighborhood for FIOS. I immediately signed up and was again the first in my neighborhood.  I am much now happier with FIOS, but this will be reviewd in details elsewhere.  This closes the "cable" chapter and I doubt I will ever go back to cable.
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