Review of AT&T YahooMember review of |  about |
|
We completed 5 years of service with ATT Yahoo DSL ( Pacbell->SBC->ATT ) I have recently started purchasing and watching Live streaming of International Cricket online and the quality and stability is awesome. Flickr pro is now free with ATT DSL. This totally rocks Service is fairly stable. Had one annoying 3 day down time about 2 months ago. ( They offered to give me credit for the days affected...but didn't have the energy to call for 3 bucks credit ). One minor annoyance. ATT is not supporting the 6meg service at my address. This is a little annoying as i live in the heart of silicon valley. If you triangulate i live at the midpoint of Yahoo, Google, HP, Adobe and Cisco corp campuses. Update, 6/16/2007 Fantastic service for the last 4 years, with ZERO interruptions or snafus. Fantastic Price/Performance ratio. dependable customer service ( on the rare occasion that i need it ). ATT, keep it up. Update 03/07/05 smooth sailing, never had to worry about anything.. 5100b is rock solid and so is my home network ( netgear814b) ...very dependable. Had to call in once to request copies of old statements and that was a breeze...and was handled very professionally by the billing staff. Update, 10/29/04 Last week i called in to renew my contract and while doing that i also mentioned that my modem was occasionally loosing ip address once in every 2-3 days and needed a reeboot. so they sent me a new speedstream 5100b modem with PPPoE built in ( i had to bitch a little bit that they give all goodies to new customers and don't help a loyal customer like me ...but i asked nicely and they were helpful. i got it yesterday ( 6 days from my phone call). plugged it in and re configured my home router to not do the login. the modem shows a speed a 3008/512 on its status page...and dsl reports speed test page shows 2.5/400 ....pretty darned good. kicks ass of comcast any day of the week and its so much cheaper...free new modem and a couple of bucks reduced on my monthly bill !!!!... tech support is awesome as usual. If you tell them that you know enuf and have a good idea of what is going on...they don;t make you do unncecessary retarded things like rebooting everything from the kitchen sink and quickly escalate you to tier2 tech support as needed. Update 9/9/04 I requested a move on Aug 28th and my phone number was changing as well so they had to re-register my circuit, I was given a live date of Sep 2nd. But I plugged in my modem on Aug 31st and the DSL light went solid...so wanted to give it a shot but I was not getting an IP address since i was not registered . So called DSL tech support and was immediately connected to Bill ( WTO5571 ) and this amazing gentleman walked me through the whole process with out even a windows machine.. I was using a freeBSD laptop ...so he trusted me to do the right thing on my end and did his end correctly and helped me get online in less than 15 minutes. VERY happy i decided to stick with SBC Yahoo!. Update 7/27/04 I requested an update for the pro-package ( 1.5-3.0M/384K PPPoE 1IP ) 5 days ago and they gave me an effective date of today...today morning i checked my speed and found that the upload has increased but the download was still a little less than 1.5 M so i called tech support....very helpful guy ( walter / could be pseudoname ) in anycase..didn;t ask me reboot or anything...just rechecked my order and escalated me to tier 2 within 4 minutes and tier 2 fellow, also wonderful chap ( can't recall the name ) rebuilt my circuit and had me on my way in less than 5 minutes and i just tested my speed 2.54M/358K  I am happy...news and mail are always smooth and the authenticated smtp lets me send mail even when i am travelling so cool.three cheers to SBC Yahoo DSL. only down side is they are charging me 3 bucks more than people who sign up fresh....but ...big deal...thats the middle management pricing game crap, the service and reliability are amazing....over the last 6 years i had internet service from RoadRunner, ATT@HOME, Speakeasy and Earthlink and SBC Yahoo now... SBC Yahoo wins hands down I have changed everything to 5 stars.Update ( 1/14/04) finally the new rate showed up on the bill. rest is smooth. After Renewal update ( 12/5/03) : Today i saw the downside of having services provided by LARGE corporations. As i said I renewed my contract for another year at the new rate of 36.95, but today i got my bill and saw $60 which was 10 bucks higher than what i was already paying. turns out the renewal won't take effect for atleast one or two billing cycles for existing customers and inbetween i am hosed because my previous contract has expired and i am on the non contract rate. The Irony of the situation is that If i had cancelled my old account and just placed a new order SBC would have had to ship me a new modem and such and I would be paying 24 bucks less for 2 months and i believe most SBC orders are live within 8-10 days of ordering. It is a minor annoyance not having connectivity at home for a week or so but then i would have been able to laugh at them instead of feeling stupid for deciding to stick with them... I don't know what to take points out for this...so i am lessening their tech support points for this. ----------------------------- Renewd my contract and its only 36.95 per month now ...awesome. the billing rep was VERRRY rude when i asked him why it is the same deal for people who have been loyal for a year and people sigining up fresh ..i got pissed a little and searched around for alternatives but as it happens no one could beat the deal. 11 months update ( Oct 2003 ): connection was rock solid i remember not being able to access the dns server once and thats about it...and ya, 1 scheduled outage for maintanance. our ipadress changed only about twice in the past 11 months. otherwise, out wifi router ( netgear mr314 ) stays plugged in all the time and we just open and close our laptops as needed...never change anything always works and very dependable...i work from home quite a bit and both the latency and bandwidth are stable. also adding or removing subaccounts and other account management is a breeze. and we like the lauchcast plus subscription, free billpay ( limited ofcourse ) and 150M for photos. i had a chance to use the SBC dial account when i was travelling in NY, MI, NM and while it connected at only 28-33K something is better than nothing. and it did connect ..the nice thing about this dialer is that it doesn't need any special software you can use any standard ppp client on linux or the usual windows dialer.tech support is also quite quick to respond if you email them and there a lot of community help on the sbcglobal.xx.xx.xx newsgroups. the badnews for me is that if now cancel for anyreason, i will also loose my free yahoo account which had for like 7 years now  ...but will most likely stay with them anyways and this time i will make sure i get the new lower rates. one nice thing about their tech support is that when on the rare occasion i called they seem to believe me when i say..i think such and such is the problem please fix it...and they don't make me reboot my computer. original review: originally I was signing up for cyberonic but i had to move appartments and somehow my line became a fiber optic line and cyberonic said they cannot do it anymore. so i grudgingly ( Pacbell was the only ISP still offering DSL after they findout there is fiber some where on the line ) signed up for SBC Yahoo DSL Delux package ( 1.5/256 and 1 dynamic ip with PPPoE ) I got $10 off the standard price with a 1 year contract. We placed the order on Nov 1st and the equipment (SpeedStreem 5360 and the CD and a D-Link pcmcia fast ethernet card and the filters etc ))arrived in mail on Nov 7th.Install was a breeze. pretty much connect the modem and pop the CD in. I was told to plug in the stuff on Nov 8th and everything worked instantly. There is one little snag with the connection manager though, it always gets the network settings wrong and i have to sign on using the enternet 300 software. Tech support was very fast ( and friendly ) in identifying and suggesting the fix for the above problem ( the total length of the call was no more than 2 mins ). Anyways, now i have a wireless acess point at home and that is taking care of the login, i don't need to do anything on my machine. it is dhcp internally now. connection seems to be pretty good so far with the throughput averaging out at 1.1/200 which i suppose is quite okay at 12000 feet from the CO. The latency to servers i connect on the east coast ( for interactive work, not gaming ) while not spectacular, is definitely stable at around 120 ms . pings to the west coast are lower on average. Mail and News are fairly fast so far. news is faster if you use the read-only server but quite good even otherwise, the best part is that i didn't have to change my email address, I just merged my Yahoo account with the username for SBC DSL and i have 25Mb quota for my yahoo account now. i believe there is a SBC Yahoo Dial account free with the DSL account but i have not had a chance to use it yet... things are good so far..crossing my fingers and hoping the next 11 months are smooth too. If they do, I will stick to them . Followup comments:
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
AT&T Yahoo
(43)
(13)
Santa Clara,Santa Clara,CA
$24 per month
about 7 days
AT&T
"Fast, Reliable, Good Customer Service, Free Flickr Pro."
"none really."
"Way cheaper than comcast! best broadband for home use."
·
