Yes, the ONT. Looks like this:
We have AT&T fiber and it is excellent. The bandwidth is stable enough for four people streaming video without glitches. And it’s low-latency enough for online gaming.
And AT&T has given us excellent service. Our gardener got a little too aggressive with trimming the trees and physically cut the fiber line from the pole into the house. AT&T had a new line installed within 48 hours and at no cost. The gardener was especially happy about that!
(I don’t know if it matters, but I’ve been an AT&T customer since I bought the original iPhone. And I have a total of four cell accounts with them.)
Note that you may have to upgrade your in-house network to get the full benefit.
Ditto. I hate AT&T with the heat of a thousand suns, but I must say in the 5+ years we’ve had their Gigabit service it has been flawless.
And always exactly $70/month just like they promised.
In February I switched from Comcast to T-Mobile (Intrepid) fiber, and it has been great. My connection went from 300/25 to 2000/2000. It is that second 2000 (2Gb) which makes all the difference. My offsite backups run very fast, and I can do stupid things like stream a 4k video from the server in my basement to the TV at my in-law’s.
I don’t know if this applies to AT&T, so it might not matter. The biggest reason to NOT switch is because the new fiber connection will probably use CGNAT. If you don’t know that that means, then it is almost definitely not a problem for you. If you do know what it means, and wonder if it might be a problem, we can talk about it more.
Can you explain that in a bit more detail? I have a Netgear Orbi mesh wifi network direct-connected to my existing Cox cable modem/router. I would assume I could do the same to a fiber router.
It means if you only use one device at a time, and it is connected over wifi, then you will never be able to get the full speed of your fiber connection.
It will depend on the speed of your existing equipment. For example, my house is built around gigabit ethernet and wifi that claims 2.4Gbps. In reality, the wifi maxes out at about .8Gpbs.
That meant any single device could saturate my old 300/25 Comcast connection, but now it is impossible for a wireless device to saturate my fiber connection. Even a wired device on gigabit ethernet cannot fully utilize my fiber connection.
That is fine. It means that multiple devices can run as fast as they are capable, and my fiber connection is able to keep up.
I did buy a $30 2.5GbE switch, and a $10 2.5GbE ethernet card to go in my basement server. This means my server is able to fully utilize my fiber connection. So when my server sends offsite backups the speed limit is how fast the other end can receive the data, not how fast I can send it.
We’ve had AT&T fiber for a long time, and never a problem. Once our internet went out, though our landline still worked, and they were able to diagnose the problem without anyone even coming. Once they found it was the modem they came with a new one within a day.
We had Comcast for cable TV after we moved in, and it was junk. We switched to satellite, also excellent. I know we can just stream, but satellite lets us record things like the news and then skip the ads, which is way worth it.
I’ve had AT&T fiber for several years. Google Fiber was introduced in our neighborhood about two years ago and the introductory price for basic 1Gb service was very, very good. But AT&T responded pretty quickly and dropped their price down to about $10/month more than Google for equivalent service. Of course, I had to call and ask for the lower rate. Since I also had U-Verse and cell service with AT&T, I got a further discount for a package that gets me even lower than Google. We have been very satisfied with AT&T fiber…it’s consistent and they respond to problems quickly. Which brings me to my AT&T service tech story…
I had an AT&T router with a VOIP service port for one “landline” telephone. The telephone failed and so I called for an AT&T tech. The tech had every piece of test equipment you could imagine, but nothing to test a basic POTS port. (I’m serious. She was using a voltmeter to check for tip and ring voltage. I had to dig out a butt set for her to use.) At first, the tech was going to tell me it was a house wiring problem and that they were not responsible, but then she looked at the history and saw that AT&T had installed the telephone wiring that failed. That made it their responsibility. While talking with me, the tech said, “I’ll just install a new piece of cable for the phone,” and reached down to cut it with her diagonal cutters. I was ALMOST able to stop her, but failed. Yup. The tech cut the fiber cable by mistake. It took a couple more hours to get new fiber run and spliced in. I tried to be gracious, but it was one of those cases where a small problem (no landline phone) was turned into a much larger one (no services at all).
I’ve had AT&T fiber for a number of years and am very happy with it. I had previously had regular AT&T, and called customer service because I was having a problem (can’t remember exactly what it was now) and was offered a deal on upgrading to fiber, which had apparently just recently become available in my area. No hard sell, just the offer.
I switched from Comcast to AT&T fiber about 8 months ago. I’m very happy with it. I’m paying less than half what I paid for Comcast and getting the same speed. I also paid nothing for the installation, which turned out to be problematic and took the installer something like 5 or 6 hours to do. The best part is, I used to get frequent outages when using Comcast. Maybe once or twice a month I’d lose service for anywhere from an hour or two up to a full day or more. In the 8 months of using AT&T, there has only been one outage, about an hour long. (In my neighborhood, the fiber lines are on power poles, not buried, so they’re more susceptible to storm damage etc.) AT&T actually reimbursed me for the outage, which Comcast never did.
Naw, Spectrum is Okay. But AT&T has the very worst customer Service. Spectrum has decent Cust Serv.
Mind you, Fiber does sound cool.