Currently suffering my third multi-hour Comcast/Xfinity outage in as many months. When I called the support line to try to get a support tech to escalate an inquiry into why I've had so many outages, the robot literally said, "An agent cannot help you. Goodbye." No, I'm not paraphrasing.

At least they’re honest about it :). Normally they’d let you badger an agent to escalate the issue to nowhere.

Trying to get to an agent is practically impossible. I called recently to make an account change, but after I went through the automated system I got an "I'm sorry, we see there is an outage in your area. Please wait for the outage to be resolved and then call back."

Insane.

I mean, what are you gonna do about it? Companies have so many customers and so much capital these days that they don't have to pretend anymore.

When I worked for Xerox doing outsourced Verizon phone support, the fastest way to get someone on the phone who actually worked for Verizon, was paid twice as much, had 100x the credit limit etc, was too tell the IVR "Disconnect service". I use this every time I have to call anything and usually get half decent service.

I wasn't even offered the phone tree to try that! It looked up my account from my phone number, told me there was an outage, said what I wrote above, and hung up.

> Too bad Sonic doesn't have fiber in my office area, but I hope they will at some point.

Aerial (telephone pole) deployment is vastly cheaper than trenching (and many business parks and newer neighborhoods were built with conduit buried with AT&T/Comcast already in them), so Sonic's deployment generally has followed where there are aerial options to utilize. That said, I think (micro)trenching is becoming more viable, so I believe plans to start delivering to some areas through that are moving ahead.

This aerial deployment maybe cheaper, but there is on going rent for having your line on someone else's poles. I have no knowledge of those rental agreements other than they exist. I wonder if the trenching style deployment also has some sort of agreement with the city?? Whenever I do see the trenching teams installing fiber lines, I'm always curious why such a small amount is being installed. I know there are many many fiber strands in the "cable" they are burying, but why just the one. Every connection needs a pair, so how ever many strands are in that "cable", there's half that number of connections.

> This aerial deployment maybe cheaper, but there is on going rent for having your line on someone else's poles.

I don't think it's much, if anything, depending on the location. My understanding is it's governed by public use policies, since it's public infrastructure. I do know it requires some work for those putting more infrastructure on there to figure out the new load and stress and submit plans for required work, and sometimes poles are identified that are degraded to the point that it requires replacement or retrofitting, but I can't recall whether that's a burden taken by the public utility, the company looking to utilize the space, it's shared, or it's situational and depends.

> I wonder if the trenching style deployment also has some sort of agreement with the city?? Whenever I do see the trenching teams installing fiber lines, I'm always curious why such a small amount is being installed.

You do need to get permits in both cases. I think microtrenching is easier to get permitted becase it causes less issues with the road. You're cutting a line an inch or so wide, so there's less worry about car tires compacting the filling material and making the road bump. Since it's deep but not wide, it could also be they're stacking multiple runs one on top of each other, which at any one point in time may look like a very small amount being inserted (I don't know, not my department).

> Every connection needs a pair, so how ever many strands are in that "cable", there's half that number of connections.

Depending on what you mean by "connection", they don't. Fiber strands are split out with optical splitters, one or more times, so a single strand back to the CO can handle multiple actual installation locations (but not too many). Planning out how many you allow generally and how much you'll allow max is a balancing act. Sometimes you deliver to a building with multiple units and you don't want to drop a line to every unit but you don't want to serve twenty units off a single strand that might be split once upstream already).

Yet AT&T Fiber is an awesome product.

Except the hot garbage they use as FTTH modulators.

That may be, but it's expensive in my area and their support is legendarily terrible. I had ADSL for 6+ years and it was an absolute shitshow. Near the end, they told me I needed to switch providers because they couldn't fix the problem, which was in the drop cable from the pole to house. I had one tech tell me to have a "tree trimming accident" and just cut the line, as they wouldn't replace it otherwise.

Also, I remember a year or two ago a discussion on reddit and possibly here about customers with HTTPS certificate errors and it was ultimately traced after months to a bad router that was mangling packets. MONTHS.

Most people at AT&T are incompetent and the ones that aren't are hobbled by the ones that are. Just my experience. YMMV.

> I had one tech tell me to have a "tree trimming accident" and just cut the line, as they wouldn't replace it otherwise

Just mind-boggling! Maybe you should have had that accident, after all.

Yeah, I seriously considered it. I was worried they'd try to bill me for it and I wasn't up for the fight. I knew I was moving to Comcast, at that point. The move from AT&T to Comcast to Sonic, each time, has felt like a 10x improvement.

I pay $90 for 1gigabit fiber AT&T in Miami. It's one of the main reasons I bought my house since it was a new development one of the first with fiber in the area.

> We pay $225/mo for coax 200/20 right now.

Do you also subscribe to cable TV?

My cable bill was about the same until I ditched the TV portion and went with Internet only. Now under $100 a month for a similar speed.

I subscribe to a combo TV/Internet plan because it costs less in absolute terms than an internet-only plan. I returned the set-top box to avoid the rental fee, and don't hook the cable TV up to anything.

This is almost certainly their business service, not residential. Our office has a similar level of service via Comcast Business, for basically the same price.

With comcast, it was cheaper to have internet+tv than just internet. The scam is that it's only cheaper for the first year, so you have to keep threatening to cancel.

The internet-only plans had no specials, so WYSIWYG but it looks expensive in year 1.

It is never actually cheaper to bundle TV once you count the Regional Sports Fee, Franchise Fees, STB rental and taxes atop all these fees.

Sales reps will happily tell you the pre-fee, pre-hardware rental cost of service, when they actually know within a few cents what your total bill will be

No, this is Business Internet. No way to get Residential at a business address.

$600/mo?!? Dam, I was paying $65/mo for 960/960. Centurylink just raised the price to $75 last month.

I'm paying $72 for Google Fiber in Taylorsville if that is an option for you. Best Internet I've ever had. Blazing fast. Practically 0 down time. Haven't had to reboot my router ever. Great equipment with no dead spots in my house. 0 complaints.

Then sounds like you live in a place where the competition is driving down the prices. Where I lived before Comcast wanted ~$250/mo for something like 600/200. Now after I've moved (only like 20 miles) I live in a place where we have a municipal fiber network. So now last time I checked Comcast is offering gig speeds for $70/mo

From the context later in the post, this is for "business broadband".

I'm paying about $425 CAD for TV/Internet ($225) 350/10Mbps, two cell phones w/20GB data ($100), and a land line ($80) plus 15% tax.

My ISP won't bundle them since TV/Internet, landline, cellphone are all different lines of business. They are one of the cheapest ISPs though. Bell Canada is aggressive (continual salesman visits to my door) and has poor service, with Rogers the same. There are resellers of my ISPs service but they are very small and support is limited.

The land line and TV and one phone is for my elderly mother. She doesn't even watch a lot of TV but the land line in her mind is essential. The cellphone is like the modern version of Medical Alert she has it in case of an emergency. If she remembers. Yet last year during a hurricane we lost all comms landline and cell for nearly a week.

Even more fun so many people moved here it's overloading all the cell towers.

I'm the "tech guy" at my church. I've had no less than SEVEN Comcast sales people hassle me over the past couple of years about "upgrading" to fiber. They even had our pastor talked into to it for a second. "It's the same price!" "Yeah, for a TENTH of the speed as coax." Luckily, he finally saw through this. I keep asking them to leave me alone, but the sales staff turns over every 3 or 4 months, and then someone new goes through the customer list all over again. I kind of get it. A new company is laying fiber all over the city, and pre-selling the service at MUCH lower pricing, so Comcast sees another market about to slip through their fingers.

Why is it so expensive? I pay less than $100/mo for their 2.5Gb/50 service. Is it business vs. residential pricing?

I'd love to have sonic.net.

I am a recent star link convert. It might work for you?

I'm always flabbergasted by the price of fiber plans in NA. The max you could pay for a household in France is less than 50€ for 8Gbps (and i assume prices are similar or lower in other EU countries), even accounting for wage gap it's quite a difference.