Review by jimk 
UPDATED: 11 days ago
member for 3.6 years, 1579 visits, last login: 1 days ago
 Raleigh,Wake,NC
 $42 per month
 about 3 days
 BellSouth
 "No home phone service required"
 "Annoying registration process, Some billing and information glitches at first, poor support, decreasing reliability and speed."
 "Not working too well right now"
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(ratings match consensus)
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AT&T is finally offering DSL without home phone service, so I went ahead and signed up. This was heavily influenced by what Time Warner Cable is doing with bandwidth caps in other markets and the complete discontinuation of news group service.
I signed up on a Monday night and they gave me the account information during the same call. Took about 10 minutes to order including hold time.
Thursday, there was a note from UPS telling me where to pick up the modem and another from AT&T saying the service is active, along with a direct line for the tech that hooked up the service, just in case there were any problems.
I hooked up the modem that night and it instantly acquired DSL sync. Rather than giving me the PPPoE account info, they now require that the customer creates the information. This is where it gets annoying, since their installer tries to force the annoying Motive software on the computer to "help" configure the modem with the account information. There is no uninstall procedure for the Motive software, either.
The only problems so far was that parts of the order didn't automatically complete, which caused problems when ordering the static IP. However, the billing department was able to resolve this without too much hassle. It appears that there are some minor glitches possibly related to the BellSouth/AT&T merger.
I have no problems getting advertised speeds (3.0 Mbps down / 384 Kbps up) and the connection has not dropped once. Signals look very good. The modem is a Motorola 2210.
UPDATE 10/20/09:
Static IP no longer free
Newsgroups discontinued
Two outages since my last review (DSLAM issues)
Speeds are now slow at night and unstable during the day. There is some packet loss which is making VoIP and Video applications painful. Multiple technician visits haven't solved anything, and other people in the AT&T Southeast forum report similar problems.
Due to the outages and slow speeds, I have had many bad experiences with phone support. Long hold times, being routed to the wrong department, and repeating the same basic steps that I tried before I ever called in over and over again.
Update 11/11/09:
Problems continue, AT&T keeps sending techs out to check the same thing over and over, and won't tell me a thing about the status of the problem. Some techs won't call back, and phone support is beyond useless.
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AT&T Southeast
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