So we all know the horror stories of Comcast, many of us firsthand. So we moved to the new house, we took that opportunity to ditch Comcast and move to something else. AT&T had a decent deal for $50 a month that had 16Mbps Internet, basic cable, HBO, and a year of Amazon Prime. We were already paying $15 a month for HBO Now, and I pay $100 a year for Prime, so it seemed a good deal. The Internet speed wasn't fantastic, but it would be fine.
Install day, which also happened to be the day we moved in (we'd been in the house for 3 weeks without Internet), came. The installer, showed up and spent about two hours at the box outside the house. He had to call in another truck at one point. After all of that, he came in the house. He opened up a wall jack and then decided it would be easier to just punch a new jack into the house. Odd, but whatever. After two more hours of this guy grumbling and complaining his way through the job (mind you, he said he'd been doing installs for AT&T for 7 years, so this should've been routine), he claimed the Internet was up, had us sign for the install, and left. Before he left, he wrote down his cell phone number and said that under no circumstances should we call customer service. Call him and he'd come back out and fix anything that needed to be fixed. I trusted the guy, and as we were still loading in our stuff and unpacking, I didn't test the Internet. I plugged in the wireless router and assumed everything was up. About an hour or so later, we found his bag of tools that he left behind. I also ran a speedtest and found we were averaging0.02Mbps down. I was pretty pissed, but was hopeful it would work itself out. We called him, left him a message about his tools and the speed, and ran out for dinner. He called back and said to just put his bag of tools outside the garage and he'd swing by and pick it up, and also check the connection at the box. The speed didn't increase for days. His bag of tools sat there. We went to Colorado and came back. His bag was still sitting there. It had been rained in multiple times. The Internet speed was up to somewhere between 2-6Mbps and fluctuated a lot in there. We called him again. Over and over. No answer, no call back. When I went to set up my remote access and Plex connection, I couldn't get past the modem. No amount of port forwarding was working, which was frustrating, but not as frustrating as the connection itself. We couldn't even watch TV and surf the web at the same time. God forbid we tried to download anything. It shut the whole connection down. Netflix was a pixelated mess.
So I went back to Comcast. For the same price, we get up to 75Mbps (currently hovering around 45Mbps) down, basic cable, and HBO. No Prime, but AT&T had already sent us the code, which I applied to the account. When Kimberly called in to AT&T to cancel service and relayed our story, there wasn't even an attempt to retain us. No fee for breaking the contract or anything. Comcast was hooked up last night, and the speeds are already great (still not what was advertised, but it's faster than we'd likely use anyway), Plex and my remote access software have no issues whatsoever, and we finally have piece of mind that we can actually fire up Netflix and not have to wait 5 minutes for it to clearly buffer.
At least we scored a free year of Prime, but we've been in the house for a month and 10 days, and we're just now finally getting a decent Internet connection. Luckily I get 7GB of hotspot data through T-Mobile, so any day I had to work, I just tethered, but if that hadn't been the case, life would've been very, very rough. In fact, when I had the S6 Edge, I barely got any signal. It wasn't until switching to the Nexus 6 that I was able to get a strong LTE signal to be able to work off of.
I was hopeful that moving away from Comcast would be a good experience; my parents have had AT&T Internet for years and had no complaints. But this was not just a comedy of errors, it was a nightmare of errors. I never thought I'd be excited to be a Comcast customer again...
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