So what might have stopped me from using DSL after so long? It wasn’t the price as I’m still paying the same price per month for Comcast Performance (12Mbps) as I was for AT&T FastAccess DSL Direct Extreme 6.0 (6Mbps) connection. Obviously the speed was an improvement for the same price, but my long dislike of cable modem networks made it worth the sacrifice in lower speeds. Ultimately what it came down to was the constant problems I’ve had with AT&T DSL service over the past several years. I’d already complained enough that they rolled a truck out at no cost and they replaced my modem and the optical network card (ONC) that serviced my home. I couldn’t understand why I had any problems with my DSL service as the line was fiber optic up until the last 25 yards as the fiber ended in the beige box in my neighbor’s yard across the street and was copper to the NTI and then only about 3′ of cat5e cable between the NTI and the modem. After the modem and ONC swap-out we’d had pretty stable service until the past couple months when once again the connection was dropping. It didn’t appear that the DSL modem was ever going out of sync we were just losing layer 3 IP traffic.

So we lost internet for a couple hours Monday and it came back on it’s own, then we lost internet again on Tuesday for a couple hours in the late afternoon and again it came back online on it’s own. Then yesterday (Wednesday) between 10:30am and noon it went down again and was still down at 7pm when we got home from work. I’d had enough! Wasted 40 minutes on the phone with DSL technical support and they claimed everything looked okay which I expected as they always do. 30 minutes after getting home with our new cable modem we were online without any problems.

On the way into work this morning I was speaking with one of the AT&T DSL tech support managers that I’ve gotten to know over the past years. He’s looking into it from his side, but realizes we’ve left AT&T DSL service, but wants to try and figure out where the breakdown was. He’s sent me an email with the details to check for 2 known issues that none of the tech support staff ever asked me to check to see if it’s a failure there. If it’s not one of those known issues than it’s something different for them to try and determine but this has been on-going now for nearly 3 years on this DSL line.

At this point the wife and I are both very happy with the speed and service on the cable modem. When I told her about my conversation with my support manager contact she replied “We like comcast better” and “speed is our friend” so we’re not going back even if it turns out to be one of the known issues, but if not maybe they can figure out what it is and help it from happening to another customer. Aside from the disconnections we had no other complaints with the AT&T DSL service and I don’t ask a lot of any provider as I don’t use them for anything but the connection. Provider email accounts just get used as spam traps as I never use them for any email address.