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AT&T @Home: stupendously adequateAug 01 '01 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Adequate consumer-level connectivity. Check out DSL if you want to run servers. I've been an @Home customer (first through TCI, now through AT&T) for two years now. The good news is that the service is usually up (I usually suffer only an hour or two downtime a month) and that when it works, it's about as fast as advertised. I use the service just for raw connectivity. My wife uses their email server, and although it is sometimes unavailable, it has never (to our knowledge) lost any mail. I can't say anything about their web hosting, I don't use it. There's some bad news as well. The demand has grown faster than @Home can keep up with. When I had my cable modem installed, they sent a two-man team. One guy actually strung the cable, the other guy installed the network card in my computer and adjusted the software. The software guy had been doing it for a week; the cable-stringer was doing his very first job, which was drilling holes in my house. And I had to book my installation appointment six weeks ahead of time just to get these two guys (who weren't even hired when I called). The software guy couldn't get my computer to work. To @Home's credit, they had a second-line computer expert come to my house the same day (by then, I'd fixed the problem). The installation was supposed to be free. I was charged for it, and it took a few phone calls to get it straightened out (though to be fair, that was on TCI's watch, not AT&T's). I was given, but not explicitly promised, a static IP address. AT&T has changed my static IP twice in the last six months as they adjust their internal networks. Usually this can be diagnosed and settled over the phone. In June/July 2001, my service was dead for a couple of weeks. They told me my modem had to be replaced. The first new modem they gave me didn't work either, and I had to schedule another visit to get a third modem. The terms of service don't allow you to run any services on your machine, so if you want to host a web, mail or news server, you're out of luck. I have been told that the TOS for DSL are less restrictive. It looks like a lot of complaints, doesn't it? But I'm just trying to be thorough. In two years, I've had three problems (IP address changed twice, original antique modem no longer supported). Mostly the cable modem just ticks along and I get blazing-fast internet access. I blew the dust off of my old 33.6 modem during the June/July downtime and used that instead, and that was pretty painful. Those DSL commercials that warn about cable modems getting slow when you're on a heavily loaded segment might be true, but you can't prove it by me. Either AT&T is doing better load balancing than their competitors want to admit, or maybe I'm just in a cable-modem-poor neighborhood.  |
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