I used to have pacbell dsl that had a d/l cap of 1.5Mbits, w/ 128Kbit uplink, then @home arrived in the area (San Francisco). My friend got it and got sustained d/l of 5-7Mbits. That was pretty dope. So I switched to @home and got the same service as my friend. Now ATTbi takes over and the service suXXX like mad. Not only are my downloads capped at 1.5Mbits, but the service is intermittent as well. The 1st week of service of the @home to attbi switch-over was painful to use. Now a month later, the service is much more tolerable, though I still seemingly get DNS problems and horrendous speed fluctuations. Sure, ATTbi has been building a network to replace @home's in case @home folds, and apparently they've done that in accord to their claim, but the QoS of ATTbi is a pale comparison to @home's.
One question, what's the advantage of capping users at 1.5Mbits/s? If downstream is uncapped, wouldn't the users just use up the available bandwidth? How does that cost the broadband companies any money? The promise is 1.5Mbps, but I'm ecstatic to get 5-7Mbps, yet I realize I'm only guaranteed 1.5Mbps. If I'm getting way above my downstream bandwidth floor, then I'm going to advertise their service to everyone I know. It's free advertising and customer happiness at no cost to the company. Now that I know that ATTbi is being a bastard and artificially capping at 1.5Mbps, I might as well go back to Pacbell, or anyone else that might provide a more mature/consistent service if there is no speed differentiation. What is ATTbi doing w/ that extra unused bandwidth?
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I used to have pacbell dsl that had a d/l cap of 1.5Mbits, w/ 128Kbit uplink, then @home arrived in the area (San Francisco). My friend got it and got sustained d/l of 5-7Mbits. That was pretty dope. So I switched to @home and got the same service as my friend. Now ATTbi takes over and the service suXXX like mad. Not only are my downloads capped at 1.5Mbits, but the service is intermittent as well. The 1st week of service of the @home to attbi switch-over was painful to use. Now a month later, the service is much more tolerable, though I still seemingly get DNS problems and horrendous speed fluctuations. Sure, ATTbi has been building a network to replace @home's in case @home folds, and apparently they've done that in accord to their claim, but the QoS of ATTbi is a pale comparison to @home's.
One question, what's the advantage of capping users at 1.5Mbits/s? If downstream is uncapped, wouldn't the users just use up the available bandwidth? How does that cost the broadband companies any money? The promise is 1.5Mbps, but I'm ecstatic to get 5-7Mbps, yet I realize I'm only guaranteed 1.5Mbps. If I'm getting way above my downstream bandwidth floor, then I'm going to advertise their service to everyone I know. It's free advertising and customer happiness at no cost to the company. Now that I know that ATTbi is being a bastard and artificially capping at 1.5Mbps, I might as well go back to Pacbell, or anyone else that might provide a more mature/consistent service if there is no speed differentiation. What is ATTbi doing w/ that extra unused bandwidth?