Their other services might be hell, but I'm now three years in on AT&T fiber internet. It has been a great experience. They charge a round dollar amount with all fees included and have only changed the price once ($10 more) after the first year deal.
Google threatened to bring fiber to my home years ago. Well, they still haven't, but doing so apparently motivated AT&T to do so. I've now had reliable 1 Gbps service for $70/month since Jan 2017, no price increases. They even started giving me free access to HBO awhile back. I keep thinking they've just somehow forgotten about my account. I assume I'll lose free HBO once the Warner sell-off is complete.
Aside, but I was recently helping my mother-in-law get Internet. She's in a place serviced by Sonic, but only over AT&T copper. Their pricing was not great. I ended up discovering Xfininty (Comcast) pre-paid. $45/month for 10'ish/50'ish Mbps service which is plenty for her, no data cap, no dealing with Comcast customer retention when she wants to cancel. This is not a well advertised service and I came across it only by accident.
I think "Google threatened to bring Fiber but never did and everyone else lowered their prices" is best case for everyone. People get reasonably priced high speed Internet, and nobody has to suffer being a Google product.
As a contrasting experience - AT&T owns the rights to supply internet via overhead lines where I live (it's rural here), with a contractual agreement to provide high speed access. Because they're a multi-billion dollar corporation and we're a township of around 500 people (and our town council are fucking morons) it's a forever agreement, and high speed is defined as dial-up.
Meanwhile, the local co-op ISP just finished running underground fiber to the township. Full gig connection for $250 set-up fee (with a 1000yd drop to your house if necessary) and $80/month forever.
In a township that small and moronic council members, have you ever been tempted to run for council position yourself? I'd have concerns that I'd become a moron in that sense as usually there are such deep rooted moronic decisions that non-morons can't do anything. So now the non-moron comes across as moronic as well.
But that's just my own personal fear.
The problem in small towns is that the idiots in charge, generally, haven't ever left the small towns. Therefore, they are blissfully unaware of their ignorance. They don't even know what they don't know.
They apply lessons their fathers and mothers learned in the 50's and 60's about how business is done with a handshake and a friendly disposition to today's world.
And if you don't have the right last name or the willingness to defer to their ignorant authority, you can't get anything done.
It's frustrating to see the same people from the same families making the same stupid mistakes for literally generations. It's more frustrating to be excluded from that process that you know you can help fix just because you dared to leave the community for any period of time regardless of whether it was for fun or for advanced university studies or your last name is tainted because your grandpa was a complete shithead, regardless of how you turned out.
A bit of a rant. But. I have been tempted to run, and I have been elected to the council. And I couldn't get anything done, because I was purposefully excluded as an outsider with too much education, regardless of what I tried. It was frustrating.
I hate to agree with this, but ATT fiber has been good for me as well. I'm going to change soon to a different, local provider, but for other reasons than "ATT fiber sucks."
Way back in the day, when DSL was The New Thing, I had a good experience with it as well. Damn you, ATT! I try to hate, but you keep meeting my expectations!
That said, a friend is getting royally jacked up by ATT incompetence and complete disinterest in slightly rural service.
Agreed. AT&T fiber has been rock solid for close to 4 years that I've been using. They've even let me keep the discount price after the promotional period (I just asked).
My only complaint is their subpar gateway. WiFi signals keep dropping when there's any kind of interference and the automatic channel finding is awful. But a one-time investment in a router and you're good.
This is pretty much my exact experience as well. I'm just too damn lazy to find a different WiFi to switch it out. It does seem to have gotten worse in the last 6months or so. I love the gigabit outbound for being able to connect to my OwnCloud server while away from home at high enough speeds I don't use Dropbox/iCloud/etc.
I use it too. Theres only one place in the house where I can plug in the required modem which makes it annoying. Also not possible to replace it with ur own equipment interestingly enough. Not sure why
My local monopoly simply increased prices across the board for everyone. Who else could we turn to for new service? Starlink is at capacity here and DSL has a nice "up to 3Mbps" disclaimer.
