arstechnica.com — In a move that's good for consumers everywhere, AT&T has refreshed its DSL pricing and removed the 12-month contracts that used to be standard in order to get the service. Ars has confirmed that it is indeed now possible to sign up for month-to-month DSL service from the telco,
Oct 4, 2006 View in Crawl 4
somedigguserOct 5, 2006
You can have email portability, if you actually pay for it. ISP based email is only designed to intentionally force people to stay with that ISP.If you get your own domain name, for less than $10 per year, you can keep your email no matter what, and it looks a hell of a lot more professional.
mrdctaylorOct 5, 2006
This is awesome news. Just this week I dumped Time Warner (Road Runner) for AT&T DSL. RR is $45/month and I talked to everyone up to the local VP and they wouldn't lower it to keep me as a customer. I'd had cable modem service for about 4 years. I couldn't get them to budge on price and their main argument was "butbutbut they require a contract!". Haha. Not anymore. Cable had better get their crap together and get their prices in line. They have a RR "Lite" option that is a measley 768kbps for a whopping $30 that they tried to push on me. No thanks.I switched to a $15 AT&T plan (which was 1.5mbps earlier this week and is now apparently 768 kbps). They said it would be turned on Friday, but I got the install package last night and got it up and running in 5 minutes--2 days early. They really under promised and overdelivered. I couldn't be happier thus far. I'm just glad I was able to get it working easily without having to use their installation CD. Yuck.So in summary: 1) DSL is going to continue to make inroads into cable's territory.2) Cable companies are run by idiots that don't realize it is easier/cheaper to KEEP and customer than to try to win said customer back from a competitor. That is all.
foneguy2Oct 5, 2006
Sounds like you aren't in an area that at&t serves - that's why you can't get it
mccarronOct 5, 2006
You mean SBC buying AT&T.
devicenullOct 5, 2006
Wow, thanks a lot ATT, you've just raised the price I pay by $5. How is this good for consumers again?Before, anyone with slight knowledge of how ATT/SBC's billing system worked could get cheaper rates. It was fairly simple to do. Call up, and ask to be rerated to the "new user" price. If they refuse, hang up, call back the next day. Eventually you will get someone who is willing to do this (Took me three tries). They will tell you that it's only available with a 12 month contract, but that was fine for me. I did this, and got their Pro package at $20 a month.
devicenullOct 5, 2006
You don't have a clue how DSL works. Your speeds are not controlled by the modem, like cable speeds are. For ATT, there are two seperate places where your speed is controlled, the sync rate of your modem, and ATT's internal router. If both these are not the same, you get the slower speed.To actually hack this, you would have to gain access to the internal system used to control this. Simply walking out to your local telco box, and mucking around with the wires won't work. The best you could do is swap your line with someone else's... which would be quickly noticed, when your telephone numbers got swapped.
whippitOct 5, 2006
i just called up AT&T and was told this is only valid in the 13 or so states operated by SBC, so the rest of us are SoL...