Review by upb 
UPDATED: 294 days ago
member for 5.6 years, 1368 visits, last login: 1 days ago
 Carriere,Pearl River,MS
 $38 per month (12 month contract)
 about 3 days
 BellSouth
 "Excellent uptime, service and speed"
 "port 25 is blocked; NetBIOS ports are blocked; DNS and mail servers are rough"
 "AT&T Southeast is good to excellent"
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(ratings match consensus)
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I have been using BellSouth (AT&T) FastAccess for over six years, and I can report that I am extremely pleased with the service. I first used the 2Wire 1000SW modem/firewall/router that BellSouth had available, and I'm still using it as a backup router for a home network which consists of up to five machines connected via WiFi, and two machines connected by means of an ethernet connection. I found the Westell routers that AT&T Southeast later provided at no additional cost to be unsatisfactory, perhaps because of the weaker signals at my location after hurricane Katrina damaged the infrastructure. At present writing, I use either the aging 2Wire or a D-Link ADSL2+ modem attached to a Linux based router
There has never been a major outage, other than that caused by hurricane Katrina, although there have been minor dropouts of one or two minutes. Measured download speeds have consistently been equal to or slightly above the advertised speed of 1472 Kb/s.
Service has been excellent. In one case, before the Federal do not call list went into effect, the telemarketers would consistently knock my DSL service off line when the ring signal was delivered to my residence. That added a new dimension to my hate of telemarketers, but I knew it shouldn't happen. AT&T Southeast quickly realized it was a problem on their end, and they corrected it on the same day that I made the trouble call.
AT&T Southeast's DSL and telephone services are handled by different corporate groups. As a result, there is sometimes confusion about billing policy. For example, I was not billed for interrupted telephone service after hurricane Katrina had knocked it out, but I did get charged for DSL!
AT&T Southeast's DNS servers have been having difficulty resolving host names ever since the at least the Summer of 2004. The problems are intermittent but annoying. For that reason, I have switched to non-AT&T DNS servers at opendns.com. AT&T Southeast announced a DNS upgrade in August 2006, but the problems have continued through Jan 2009.
1.5 MB/s DSL for residential networks has come down from $63/mo to $38/mo (I've included a $5 monthly home networking fee in the price). Hurricane Katrina apparently damaged the infrastructure enough that only 1.5 Mb/s service was available in our area, even after fiber optic cable was laid in the subdivision. Recently, AT&T Southeast made an equipment change, and it now appears that the higher speed DSL tiers are available in my area. Both of my routers claim that the achievable downstream rate has increased from 2 Mb/s to 17 Mb/s.
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AT&T Southeast
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