Looking for success stories in Qwest/Centurylink land

Mon Jan 28 19:48:09 UTC 2013

On 28 January 2013 10:35, Warren Bailey
<wbailey at satelliteintelligencegroup.com> wrote:
> Spoken like a true ATT customer..;)

I've had an AT&T FTTU in my bedroom closet, which was an Alcatel
HONT-C (4 POTS (unused), 1 Ethernet; 155.52 Mbps upstream and 622.08
Mbps downstream; shared with at most 32 users), and AT&T California
outright refused to provision the U-verse internet at anything higher
than 18Mbps downstream and 1.5Mbps upstream, at a time when their
web-site loudly offered a 24Mbps tier for the general public for 10
extra bucks.

Yes, this was at a time when VDSL2 users were already provisioned
24Mbps down and 3Mbps up; FTTU users weren't privileged as such (and
probably still aren't to this day).

AT&T FTTU experience starts with the installation: you have a fibre
technician that calls you prior to the date of the centrally-scheduled
appointment, and tells you that you'll have an extra appointment prior
(and in addition) to the original pre-scheduled appointment date.
He'll also likely confide in you that that's the way things work at T
-- he has to schedule his own appointments for FTTU ONT installation,
and no single customer is beforehand informed of any such
appointments.

Then in a misunderstanding that something can be done to get the
advertised speeds that certainly must be supported by the installed
ONT, you can spend hours with sales, tech support and the AT&T
California executive office, who will all give all sorts of excuses
that you are too long from the CO / VRAD / etc etc.  Whereas in
reality AT&T is simply too lazy to update their FTTU provisioning
profiles, and not a single FTTU installation is being offered any
internet services above 18Mbps.  (Somehow, it is my impression that
noone in the company even knows this for a fact -- I've not had a
single over-the-phone representative confirm that 24Mbps tier is never
offered for FTTU.)

Note that even if you disregard the fact that Verizon successfully
delivers 25/25, 50/20 and many other tiers over essentially the same
technology, the simple math of 622/155 divided by 32 users turns out
to be higher than 18/1.5, and especially several factors higher than
the 1.5 part of 18/1.5.  This does not even account for many people
getting the cheapest and slower tiers, or the fact that the whole
point of FTTU BPON is overprovisioning support.

Well, that's AT&T for you:  already has the network, already has the
price structure, already has the marketing going, already has all the
passive and active equipment installed that's capable of vastly
superior speeds, already has the customers willing to pay more each
month for faster speeds, and already has customers abandoning FTTU
services because of artificially-imposed speed limitations, yet T
still can't be bothered to flip some provisioning bits.

C.