AT&T Quietly Introduces $10/Month DSL

prostoalex writes "As part of the deal with the FCC to approve the AT&T/BellSouth merger, AT&T started selling, but not advertising, a $10-per-month DSL service in 22 states, AP has learned. 'The service provides download speeds of up to 768 kilobits per second and upload speeds of up to 128 kbps, matching the speeds of the cheapest advertised AT&T plan, which costs $19.95 per month in the nine-state former BellSouth area and $14.99 in the 13 states covered by AT&T before the acquisition.'"

Worthless

[Lord Ender]

To get ATT DSL, you need to sign up for a 1 or 2 year contract, pay an installation fee, and buy their landline service.

Because anybody with a clue is using VoIP by this point, these terms basically mean their $10 DSL costs $35 (=$10 for DSL + $25 for worthless phone service) PLUS the amortized cost of installation and the effective cost of an illiquid 1-2 year contract.

Note: Last time I priced DSL, these were the requirements. They may have changed, and if so, feel free to correct me. Until T unbundles their services, though, I'm sticking to cable.

Re:That price is basically a lie.

[Constantine XVI]

If you re-read the TFA, it also said:

who have never had AT&T or BellSouth broadband

Au Contraire

[SpaceLifeForm]

I just ordered it for someone today that already had POTS.
Got the 1.5Mbps package for $20/month. Did it online,
which probably helps.

The catch is that you also have to purchase a DSL modem ($50)
or a combo DSL Modem/Router ($80), plus another $27 for S&H.

And you'll definitely want to skip the $200 technician option
to install it for you.

Link

[g0dsp33d]

Its there for anyone signing up, as its on their page [bellsouth.com].

I'm still stuck on crappy dialup or one way services. :(.

not so quiet, bellsouth/att advertises it

[Squeezer]

http://www.bellsouth.com/consumer/inetsrvcs/inetsr vcs_agreement_plans_pop.html [bellsouth.com] right there on their website, thanks consumerist!

You don't need a phone line

[rwade]

AT&T requires a phone line for discounted service. The subscriber still qualifies for service at a higher price.

wow

[jzuska]

It's as fast as my 3g phone.

Re:If it were free it would still be overpriced

[hobo sapiens]

Oh, stop your kvetching. How on earth can you find fault with them for offering $10 a month DSL? Seriously?

I use AT&T and it works fine. I never have any problems with the service nor the customer service. Actually, their customer service is way better than most companies I have dealt with.

!Worthless

[hobo sapiens]

* shrugs *

I use AT&T DSL, and it works great. I didn't pay any installation fee. And it doesn't cost nearly what cable does.

Besides, your statement that anyone with a clue uses VOIP is a little ridiculous. Like all blanket statements, it's absolutely false :D

Seriously, why do you say that? Personally, I prefer POTS to VOIP. If nothing else, POTS has proven reliability. It's certainly much simpler than VOIP. When it comes to essentials like telephone service, the simpler the better; it has fewer failure points. How could you possibly argue that something that relies on a high speed internet connection and a working PC is better than a simple POTS line and then imply that anyone who has POTS is clueless?

Re:Which states?

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, California, Nevada, Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee

Cost in Chicago

[djfake]

I've had Ameritech or SBC or ATT DSL for over seven years now. Here's what it costs for May 2007: Telephone (excluding calls & Call-Waiting): $16.08, DSL Basic:$14.99. Tonight's line test: 1313kps download / 313kps upload. Other than the fact that the DSL charge will go up to $19.99 upon renewal, it's done nothing but get less expensive. My only grip is that on the rare occasion when I have to call customer service, I have to deal with some off-shore help center. I always demand level two support immediately.

G711

[thegameiam]

FYI, there are two VoIP codecs which are common: G711 is relatively uncompressed, and when Ethernet overheads are included, comes out to about 80K per stream (yes, much more than POTS). G729a is highly compressed, and runs about 8K. There is a significant MOS score difference between the two codecs, and many IP Telephony add-ons (lots of voice mail, for instance) requires G711.

-David

Re:Which states?

[lazytiger]

Or, for you visual learners, here's a map:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:RBOC_map.png [wikipedia.org]

You've got lots more than two options

[Anonymous Coward]

"Everybody hates the phone company." [imdb.com] And cable companies also suck, plus they're the ones encouraging their competition to cap the monthly download capacity and ban anything resembling a server from residential broadband, and are really much better at selling Pay-Per-View than visionary telecom services.

But they're not the only options for service, even if they're the only ones bringing wire to your house. There are lots of non-facilities-based broadband carriers that provide the upstream Internet connectivity and resell the telco access - I use Sonic.net, and a number of friends use Speakeasy, and there are numerous others. And there are other carriers like Covad who rent the copper from the telco and provide their own DSLAMs over it, either selling directly or selling to the non-facilities-based carriers who offer them as well as telco service.

For basic service, the resellers and niche ISPs usually cost more than the telco, though they're usually giving you a real price and not some three-month-trial rate. But if you want static IP addresses, you'll find that most of the telco services end up charging just as much as the resellers, even though their actual _costs_ are probably lower. Another big difference is policies about things like running servers; many of the resellers are quite upfront about "yes, we're giving you *Internet* access, not just couch-potato consumer service", and you can do anything except spam and maybe run some kinds of IRCbots. By contrast, telco and cable broadband providers used to have policies against using multiple computers on the same connection, or using wireless, or required you to use PPPoE which they wouldn't support on Mac or Linux (even though there's perfectly adequate Linux client.)

They also tend to give you better customer service - more responsive and more competent. It's not always faster for repairs - I've had DSL go out three or four times in the last 5 years, once because the DSL modem failed (they helped me diagnose it, and shipped me a replacement box next day), and a couple of times because some telco installer did something in one of the junction boxes down the road (the ISP was probably a bit slower at getting it fixed than going directly to the telco would have been, but reaching the ISP's techs was a lot faster which helped make up for it, and the last time that happened I could use a neighbor's wireless to stay on the net.)

In some places, there's cellular-phone wireless data (everybody hates their cellphone companies also, and most of them want to charge you old-pager-service pricing per KB, or not let you connect your phone to your PC.) And there's satellite service (which has technical limitations due to the geosynchronous-orbit hop, but I'm not going to say they suck, because you knew it was satellite when you ordered it, and you probably bought it because it was the only thing you could get other than paying business prices for a telco T1 circuit.)

Re:And what's to stop them from...

[bdjacobson]

The important improvement would be the latency.

If there is no bandwidth cap (it's slow enough they don't need a b/w cap) then this is a great deal in my opinion. I don't need that Linux ISO _right_ now.

Re:If it were free it would still be overpriced

[michrech]

Dealing with AT&T is just not worth it for cheap Internet Service. Even if it were free, I don't think I'd go for it. Besides, if it goes anything like my experience getting phone service from them, that $10 will really be $25 a month with all the extra fees and surcharges they are sure to add on.

Funny you should mention the "extra fees".

I moved into my house March 15'th. I called them (from my cell phone) to see how much "naked" DSL would run me a month. At the time, they had their $19.95 package (Still do). The fee was $24.95 ON TOP OF the $19.95 a month.

Care to guess what a basic phone line costs from them (after fees and taxes)? If you guessed $24.95, you win! I told the lady, "So, to get 'naked dsl', you are charging me exactly the same price as a phone, in the form of a 'fee'. To top it off, you're not going to provide the phone service! How the hell do you people get away with this?!". Her response? "Nooo, sir.. this fee is actually cheaper than bundling in phone service!". My reply was "Lady, I may not have done very well with math when I was in school, however, I'm pretty damned sure $24.95 for a basic phone is the *same* price as the $24.95 "fee" you just tried to charge me for NOT getting phone service." As she started to bumble on, I told her AT&T could stuff the service where the sun isn't shining, and that I was going to call my local cable company (who just started offering phone service).

AT&T can kiss my hairy white ass. They drove me right into the wide-open arms of my local cable provider (CableONE). I have no need for a phone line (haven't had one since I was 20, I'm 30 now...), and I'm not about to sit here and be treated like a fucking moron when I have other choices (there is also a wireless provider in town in addition to the cable company).

Now that many cable companies are starting to offer phone services, I wonder if that will spark a wave of change in how AT&T operates. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it, though.

Re:Other problems

[gavink42]

Okay, working for a telco, I throw the bull$hit flag on this one! DSL is either available to your cable pair, or it's not. It's all based on your distance from the CO or SLC DSLAM.

So, unless you're getting your dial tone FX'd in from another CO, as long as your pair is qualified as good (distance and not loaded), it doesn't matter what your phone number is! Heck, we even have people with ported numbers and DSL on their line!

Re:And what's to stop them from...

[dwater]

> plus with not having to wait for the connection to establish

Eh? I have (A)DSL, and I have to wait a little while for it to 'connect'*...of course, I don't have to disconnect, but it does seem to do that on it's own every now and again (once a day?).

*the DSL 'modem' has to connect, then the DHCP has to do it's stuff (do some DSL have permanent IP configs)?

Re:And what's to stop them from...

[gallwapa]

Math?

100 kilobytes download = approx 768kbits/ps. fancy that, eh?

Funny how it works. 1.5 / 8 = 192kbyte/s max - assuming no latency or TCP issues. Woo.

you're getting what you paid for.

Re:If it were free it would still be overpriced

[thebear05]

i was only offered it after i said i was switching to cable, they can do a dry loop and give you dsl without phone service, this was from verizon i have told others about this and they have received the service by asking for it.

Re:And what's to stop them from...

[dwater]

> You likely have a USB modem and this is your problem.

Good Lord, no.

I have a regular DSL modem with a RJ45/10BaseT socket (no USB). I have a Linksys WRT45G doing the DHCP...

I'm not sure what they do to 'disconnect' me, but the connection goes 'dead' - as in no traffic. The modem still shows it is connected, mostly; though even that sometimes disconnects. The modem at my end has to connect to another modem at the other end, so all they have to do is disconnect the other end.

Unless I'm very much mistaken...

Re:And what's to stop them from...

[neokushan]

Oh, sometimes ISP's just do that, for various reasons (some just like to keep their pool of IP's constantly circulating, I guess so that you can pay them a premium for a static IP). But sometimes it can be caused by interference on your phone line. Since you've got DSL, you should also have microfilters plugged into EVERY object that's connected to your phone line, check them just to be sure (I had a similar issue because our satellite box also plugged into the phone line and the engineer didn't bother to plug in the microfilters correctly).