XFinity/Comcast/Time Warner vs AT&T U-Verse

[Cpl Ledanek]

Disclaimer: I do not work for any of these two companies.

I'm soliciting for advice and experience.
Currently, we have an AT&T most basic DSL package and the mandatory AT&T landline for DSL to work and DirectTV for tv viewing.

AT&T current specials are these

now if we go with Comcast, we can finally drop the useless AT&T landline (since we use cellphone majority of times) and just sign up for any of their TV & Internet deals.

I'm 10hrs a day away from any of these. If, I am at home, I'm on the Internet more often than watching TV. I rarely watch any sports on TV, no reality shows, or premium channel shows. On the daily work-week basis, I'm on the Internet for 1hr the most...waiting for my slow basic DSL downloads. Needless to say, I I'm wasting time waiting for downloads.

So, I'm trying to balance on what is an ideal subscription for me.
Most economical, not too excessive on the bandwidth (it doesn't make sense to me so far to have/pay for 50Mbps when I'm mostly away).

Equipment
Should I shop my own equipment? What do you recommend for modem+wireless router for cable internet?

advance thanks

[[XC] Synthetickiller]

I'll give you my experience with ISPs as a whole.

I had Bellsouth (AT&T) for DSL up through 1.5mbps speeds way back in the day. Good service, but DSL was slow as can be. I don't ever want to go back to slow DSL. No issues w/ customer service. If there was a problem, it was corrected.

I moved to Charter for about 3 years around 30mbps. Good speed & rarely had any issues. Same as with AT&T. Everything worked or was made to work.

I then moved and had Comcast for about 6 weeks, if that. The speeds were horrendous. Speed tests looked amazing, but the actual speed on long downloads was all over the place. It has been the only ISP i can recall using that would have any and all download fluctuate from a full 25mbps down to less than 1mbps and back again. The speeds are a joke & none of the services they deliver are on par with their claims. That includes video quality from their cable subscription, not just internet speeds. After cancelling & confirming multiple I that I have a zero balance & owe nothing, I was sent a bill which I contested. After having someone claim it was a mistake, I received a letter from a collection agency not 20 days after the bill was "due" to collect. I've never heard of this type of treatment. They basically tried to ruin my credit. After spending a good 5 hours on the phone speaking to multiple people & becoming down right rude, they finally cancelled the bill & claimed it was a mistake. I'd never use Scamcast again as long as I live.

I switched from Scamcast to Centrylink with a 40/5 connection for less than & was paying before. Solid speeds is an understatement. I was getting 5mbps & maxing the connection whenever a download would allow it. Getting the service set up was basically a hassle and coordinating service activation wasn't the easiest time. Once you deal with all of the BS of incompetency, you will have a solid set up.

Moving back home, I got a 100/5 connection from Charter again. After moving around to 3 different locations, I had no issues keeping the billing address straight or getting the connection hooked up in a timely manner. Speeds are usually within 80% or great of what's advertised & the upload is always 5.


All I can say is, good luck with scamcast. They & time warner have the worst customer ratings of almost any company in America for a reason.

I can't really tell what speeds you need as I have no clue what you're downloading. Is 18mbps not enough? 2.5x that is almost 50mbps, so it's difficult to say what your needs are. I'd stick with AT&T unless those speeds aren't enough. You should have far more stable speeds.

If you end up going w/ scamcast, there's a lot of options. I think the Motorola 6141 is the best modem you can get for the money. There's also the 6121. It can't do 8 channel bonding (I think), but at the speeds you're talking about, it shouldn't be an issue. I've never had issues with either one in my experience & I pushed some lengthy downloads that ate up a lot of bandwidth.

As for a wireless router, it's relative to your needs. I had a D-link DIR-655 for 5 years that died from length data transfers (backing up 2TB+ of data at a time). My Asus RT-N66U router holy held out for 2.5 years. I think the data transfers kill these consumer routers. Both have had nic failues along with issues connecting to the internet.

I'm currently in the process of building a pfsense router & I'm slowly conferting over to a unifi AP. The Unifi AP is great for wireless. If it fails, you just buy another one. The router is separate, so you don't lose all of the functionality if the AP goes down. On top of that it is an enterprise level product, so you get a lot of features & far better stability. The AP runs on POE, so you never need a power cord. You can also add more APs that will seamlessly pick up where the last one left off. This type of handoff is nice with voip. You never lose connection or or quality. The one major caveat is that you need to run the Unifi AP software on a PC (mac or windows, I didn't see linux support). I'm still trying to figure out if you can run the AP in a simple mode (no guest mode or any special statistic features) that don't require the use of a pc to run the software.

I am only explaining my situation w/ the router/wifi ap because I have gone through a ton of routers in my time. It's irritating to throw money down a rat hole since they seem to break over time. You can buy prebuilt pfsense for $100+ on ebay that would be very solid & will probably last a lot longer if you just never want to replace it again.

If you do what an all in one router, check out smallnetbuilder. There's a lot more info there on networking than you'll find here.