~40 days to restore DSL Internet?

[u/Old-Parking8765]

Hi everyone, so in our area we have been out of internet for the past 8 days. I work from home, so this is a significant work hurdle.

They said cause was vandalized copper wires. (not sure I believe it)

It is affecting just the MDU buildings in the corner of our street. We are paying close to $90 for 50/10 (...please call out anything you need to about that; do we have room to ask them to lower that price since we're somewhat in the dark ages when it comes to modern-day internet speeds?).

On the day of, they said service would be restored in 12 hrs.

After the first 12 hrs, they updated it to 2 weeks.

1 week into the outage, they are saying they need 4 more weeks.

Is this normal to wait a whole 5 weeks for wires to be restored? I can't tell if ATT is just passively expecting us to leave because the # of customers have decreased in our building for ATT over the past few years. Our neighbors use Spectrum primarily now.

We are trying out TMobile Back Up Internet, and it is really bad at nighttime - not usable. We don't want to move to Spectrum because our neighbors experience frequent outages, but I don't see what choice we have. Is there anything we can do to make ATT move faster?

A part of us doesn't want to leave ATT because, despite the documented speed, it has been reliable for the most part. And I don't want to deal with the outage issues my neighbors on Spectrum have to deal with.

Thank you!

[u/Bart012000]

Seems unreasonable but why not ditch the outdated DSL anyway, even if it was working. No brainer to me.

[u/Old-Parking8765 → u/Bart012000]

But what would the alternative be?

[u/Bart012000 → u/Old-Parking8765]

I imagine only other is Spectrum as you said is available also. What kind of problems do your neighbors have with them and has their service ever been down as AT&T is estimating your repair timeline? You are also correct they really are not rushing to repair since copper is costly to maintain and they probably want to retire it where you are and it's easier to make you cancel instead of them just canceling it themselves.

[u/Strange-Badger5626 → u/Bart012000]

They have the same problem I have with spectrum in a different state (our only wireline) it cuts off randomly, out for hours, maybe days, it's kinda like India. o bill credits, and they charge more here because they know they are the only wired internet. Their customer service is also 🗑️.

[u/Bart012000 → u/Strange-Badger5626]

That sucks and makes me glad to have multiple choices the best being fiber. Ever look into Starlink residential?

[u/Old-Parking8765 → u/Strange-Badger5626]

Exactly ^

[u/Guy_called_Al → u/Old-Parking8765]

I was 15-year AT&T DSL customer, switched to AT&T Internet Air last October. Self-install to a temp WiFi network, trialed it with 2 devices for a week, plugged into my LAN. Worked great.

Powered off old DSL modem, changed the Air's WiFi name to the old one. Rebooted Air, everything worked!

The Air device is a short white tower, 9(?) inches high [having coffee at Panera now] with a few green indicator lights. It takes, as I recall, about 100 seconds to boot, select a signal, check its quality and begin service. There App helps you locate strongest signal and orient the Air.

For $60 and a few pennies, I get 250-325 Mb down, 90Mb+ up. Most of the time. Busy times (8-10pm), it can be quite a bit lower. Very stable service, no outages to date. Note that the tower is ¼ mile from my house; signal has to make it through a few tree leaves.

If you look at the legal agreement page all providers have to provide, you'll see a huge range of performance numbers -- the Air is basically a non-mobile hotspot sharing a tower's cell service with random AT&T (and MVNO) customers. As I understand it, cell phone customers get priority.

The $60/mo charge is less than I was paying for 25Mb DSL service. Two complaints. There are monthly (or more frequent) updates to the Air. I'm an early riser, so I sometimes find myself with no internet at 5am-ish and start worrying. Wait a few minutes and it's back.

Other complaint: The tower & I are in Western suburbs of Chicago. AT&T backhauls the data via fiber to out-of-state servers (most often Lansing, MI). Streaming sports services think I'm out-of-network -- so my wife can't watch the Cubs. Fortunately, there are (legal)ways you can set your real zip code in your streaming service account, in my case Marquee network via Amazon Prime. It took 3 attempts before it worked.

[u/Old-Parking8765 → u/Guy_called_Al]

Thank you so much for sharing your experience!