Will competitors take up the slack where U-verse expansion has left off?
In 1998 I watched ATT dig up all the streets here in Oakland and lay fiber. It wasn't until 2003 that they said my house, 100yds from the road they laid fiber in over to my local switch, was ADSL capable. The only thing they had to do was throw the switch from their end and I plugged in a frequency splitter dongle for land line phone and DSL. The modem set itself up and connected at power up. That was around the time Comcast made a big push in Oakland with it's cable internet service. I started putting in my zip code on the ATT availability site in 2001 to see if my part of down town Oakland was DSL ready. In 2003 when my zip code finally came back yes, service is available in your area. I used the automated sign up site to register my hookup ticket. The response screen said, proudly providing DSL service to Oakland since "1999". I was auto dropped a modem with dongles and instructions to plug it in after a certain date when my DSL service would be switched on.
Then when U-verse came online I started getting offers to switch over. I ignored them, and my routing started changing to gateways that dropped packets going out of state. Thinking it was my old modem I purchased a new ATT Motorola ADSL approved modem. Which upon registering on the ATT network, changed my gateway to one that didn't drop packets and gave me fewer hops to the game server with a shorter ping time. That was 2009 but, the letters and offers kept coming to switch to U-verse. Six months ago my routing was switched to a really crappy gateway that at least once a week made playing the game impossible. I started thinking about calling in and talking to tech support.
So as of this last Sunday the 26th, they just switched off my ADSL service in Oakland and forced me to call tech support. At least ATT had me back up and online inside of 24 hours from my call to tech support. It's kind of interesting that my gateway also has an IP6 address for VoIP. The U-verse rep agreed to leave my land line phone in tact. Yes the old handset still has tone. It receives it's tone from my gateway, not from the ATT switch. Yes ATT really wanted me fully on U-verse. So if there is a power outage, I can still dial 911 on my touch tone hand set as long as the RG, or residential battery backup that came with the ATT gateway still has power.
ATT is working very hard at getting out of the old tone wire and central switch phone business. Wonder how that works for people who live in fly over country who still rely on that central switch based phone tone?
