(IT Help!) Anyone else have or tried AT&T Fiber Internet service?

[sparked1]

So, I got tired of Comcast making me call them every 6 months for a "promo" price, even after 15 years as a loyal auto-paying customer. And the best they could do even with a promotion was $59.99 for 150Mbps internet, which goes to $79.99 after the promo, yes, $80 for 150Mbps internet service with a monthly data cap. Ridiculous.

Anyhow, I dumped them and went to ATT Fiber. The reviews for ATT internet were about as bad as the ones for Comcast so I figured it should be good to go. Got 300Mbps for $40/mo for 12 months then it's $60. The service is much, much faster than my Comcast service - I get 400 up/down consistently, and no data cap since I also have Directv.

So, I really want to like the service, but I'm having an odd issue ever since they installed it. Throughout the day, my internet will lag for a few seconds. It doesn't disconnect completely, it simply cannot resolve DNS names is what it appears to be. It only lasts for a few seconds, 20 seconds at the most and then goes back to normal. Every so often I get a "server could not be contacted" white page on Chrome, but the gateway (modem) shows that's it's connected to the internet. I think it has something to do with either congestion on their network, or some type of DNS resolving issue.

I have the tech who installed it working on it, but don't have much faith in him. I work from home and cannot have this service cutting out all the damned time. I REALLY do not want to go back to Comcast either, but I may have no other choice. And of course, I have a house full of females all complaining about how the new wifi sucks (talk about first world problems)!

Anyhow, has anyone had this service and have you had issues with it?

 

[sparked1]

BTW, nothing in my network or connected devices has changed. The only thing that has changed is the provider and the router, which is now an ATT "gateway" that acts as both a modem and 2.4/5GHZ wifi router. I even put my old ASUS router back in the mix and turned off the gateway's wifi but still get the same issue. It's definitely something on ATT's end.

 

[DADI03]

We dropped comcast a while back. Every now and then it drops like that but about twice a week maybe. Not as bad as you're saying though. But we don't need it to be as reliable as you do. It's just for home use. I like them much better than comcast and it's almost half price of comcast

 

[Gunanddoglover]

I thought it was just me. I've had the same problems since I switched over to ATT fiber. I didn't have any problems when I had the old cable modem.

 

[sparked1]

We dropped comcast a while back. Every now and then it drops like that but about twice a week maybe. Not as bad as you're saying though. But we don't need it to be as reliable as you do. It's just for home use. I like them much better than comcast and it's almost half price of comcast

Thanks for the reply. That's not promising. As much as I hated Comcast customer service, the internet itself was rock solid. Never had any slowness issues and complete outages were very rare.

 

[sparked1]

I thought it was just me. I've had the same problems since I switched over to ATT fiber. I didn't have any problems when I had the old cable modem.

Dammit! I really hope this is not "normal".

 

[Leatherhead]

Been thinking about switching to ATT myself....in for more info.

 

[Bushwhacker]

Im going to really, really bore you but you asked. My .02, it's equipment (IP based equipment, routers, etc.) It could be the router at the end user which is you and most likely the culprit. Or the AT&T feeding equipment, which I your case would be the OLT or ROLT depending on location (Optical Line Termination in the Central Office of your wire center or Remote-OLT meaning in a cabinet in the field). This is the phone companies t erre rumination point, or basically where your service is broken out from the all the other users in a fiber. It's a Passive Optic Network or PON so there aren't a ton of places your individual service makes an appearance. And well, it's fiber, just glass with light passing thru it. It doesn't care at all about DNS or anything else. Just point A and point B. So 99% of the time it will be equipment causing DNS errors
If a new router doesn't fix it. They might need to check some latency issues at the OLT.

Think cell phones, they are only cellular from handset to tower where the information is converted to optical and sent on fiber at the speed of light to wherever you are commuting with and then the opposite happens, optical/digital conversion.

So, that was boring and not a ton helpful as it ultimately doesn't matter if it's fiber or equip.ent causing problems, you just want it fixed.

Hope they get it fixed, I love mine. I have speed issues sporadically but it hasn't gone out to this point.

 

[500mag]

Bump up to the 1G service for $70/mo. I have it, and consistently get 950 Mbps up and down with no issues.

 

[sparked1]

Im going to really, really bore you but you asked. My .02, it's equipment (IP based equipment, routers, etc.) It could be the router at the end user which is you and most likely the culprit. Or the AT&T feeding equipment, which I your case would be the OLT or ROLT depending on location (Optical Line Termination in the Central Office of your wire center or Remote-OLT meaning in a cabinet in the field). This is the phone companies t erre rumination point, or basically where your service is broken out from the all the other users in a fiber. It's a Passive Optic Network or PON so there aren't a ton of places your individual service makes an appearance. And well, it's fiber, just glass with light passing thru it. It doesn't care at all about DNS or anything else. Just point A and point B. So 99% of the time it will be equipment causing DNS errors
If a new router doesn't fix it. They might need to check some latency issues at the OLT.

Think cell phones, they are only cellular from handset to tower where the information is converted to optical and sent on fiber at the speed of light to wherever you are commuting with and then the opposite happens, optical/digital conversion.

So, that was boring and not a ton helpful as it ultimately doesn't matter if it's fiber or equip.ent causing problems, you just want it fixed.

Hope they get it fixed, I love mine. I have speed issues sporadically but it hasn't gone out to this point.

This gateway won't let me enter my own DNS servers, so I can't test much further. But it acts like it's having trouble resolving addresses. The status bar will show "waiting for....." and sometimes it will then show a white page with what appears to be a DNS timeout error. Anyhow, thanks for the input! I'm going to ask the tech for a new gateway.