My introductory year of AT&T U-verse fiber internet at $40 was over. The price would have gone up to $50 per month for 50 Mbps service, but I called them to see if they would keep my rate at $40. They said they don’t do any service for less than $50, but if I upgraded to 100 Mbps service I could get that for $50 for a year. I knew Comcast had plans for $40, so I said no thanks, please cancel my account when it expires. But they said I could only cancel at the end of a billing cycle which was April 8 (originally got service March 12, 2018) so I would need to pay them nearly a month at the new higher rate to avoid a cancellation fee. That really made me mad. There is no way in the world they can’t make plenty of money by leaving that wire hooked up to my house and having me pay them $40 every month, but whatever.
Since now I had nearly one extra month of service, I didn’t need to sign up with Comcast yet, but as it got within 10 days or so, I started shopping deals and found Comcast Xfinity for $30 per month for 25 Mbps service, which is the minimum for streaming 4K content (they also had 60 Mbps for $40). I think it may be better to start at the lower speed not only to save $10, but in a year it might allow me to get an upgrade for another year at $40. They don’t allow discounted downgrades. I already had a Comcast compatible cable modem from the last time I was with them, so I didn’t have to pay a fee for that and I think I had to agree to automatic payments and electronic billing (which I would do anyway). Since it was still over a week off, I was able to pick a weekend appointment for installation, so I wouldn’t have to miss work and use vacation time.
Knowing I would switch and that my old wifi router didn’t provide a good signal to the TV room, I went ahead and bought a 802.11ac router for $48. Plus I had to pay $70 for installation, so that’s a cost of switching, but the new plan will pay for itself in 6 months compared to doing nothing and paying $50 with AT&T.
They showed up in their window of 10-12 today. Their box was still attached to the side of the house, but a storm had knocked a tree down on their old cable, so they had to string a new cable to the house. Still he was probably done in about an hour. The speed through the router and ethernet is right at 30 Mbps and I can get 25 Mbps over wifi in the TV room using the 5GHz band (that band isn’t supposed to work as well through walls, but is much faster and less crowded than the 2.4 GHz band; the router broadcasts two different wifi signals). The only downside is the upload speed is only 2.5 Mbps, which is pretty awful. It’s not like I upload much, but AT&T’s fiber line had the same speed for download and upload. All I had to do was move the ethernet cable from the AT*&T modem to the cable modem and I was pretty much set (Comcast still had to do some kind of authorization of the account which took a few minutes, but the technician took care of that). Pretty easy switch.
Got my first bill. Instead of $29.99, they charged $34.99 plus taxes of about $3. I called them and they are going to fix it. AT&T charged me exactly $40 each month.
One of the neat things about being with Xfinity is they have a lot of public hotspots (their residential routers by default also broadcast an xfinitywifi hotspot). When I signed up this time the rep said I could start using the hotspots right away and this worked fine until my installation date, I guess. Now I found out that unless you sign up with 60 Mbps service or higher, you don’t get access to their hotspots. It isn’t that big a deal since I never use the whole data allowance on my phone, but it was a decent perk, now gone.
I got my second bill and this time it was exactly $29.99. They correctly applied the $5 credit last month and my autopayment was for the amount it should have been. So everything is okay. Really better since I don’t seem to be paying any taxes or fees.
I was getting pretty bad download speeds watching TV in the den. There was still a cable running from the den to the Comcast box on the back of the house, so I hooked the feed up to that and moved my modem and router (and eventually my server) to behind the TV. No problems now, but with the router further away from the TV, laptop, and Fire TV stick in the back room, we’ll see if that is okay. The TV in back is only HD, not 4K, so it shouldn’t need as strong a signal. The back room is actually outside of the brick walls of the house since that room was an addition, so I think it makes more sense to have the router within the brick walls.
I forgot that the TV, Blu-ray player, and AV receiver all have ethernet jacks. Since they are all within a foot or two of the router now (and so get great wi-fi reception), I went ahead and connected them via ethernet cables and set that up. Maybe it will free up some wi-fi bandwidth or something. Unfortunately the Roku, which has the most 4K streaming apps and therefore could benefit the most from ethernet, only has wi-fi.
My year is about up and I didn’t want to get stuck paying a higher rate, so I looked online to see if any deals were available. They had one deal for internet and TV for $40. I didn’t need TV, but it was a faster internet speed, so I added that to my cart and found out there was a $15 per month charge for local channels plus $2 in taxes. So the $40 plan was $57 per month. They were only giving me 10 channels in the first place!
So instead I called them. One of the options on the automated menu is cancel your service, which seemed closest to what I wanted. I think this was a good choice because I got a representative fairly quickly and she was pretty cooperative. She asked how many devices were using internet at the same time and I answered three (later on found out this was a good number because the lowest end is for 1-2 devices). So she gave me a 40 mbps plan (I think, it doesn’t say this anywhere) for $40 a month, but I get $10 back for doing paperless billing and electronic payment, so back down to $30 again for hopefully a little more speed.
Definitely not 40 mbps, just 30 mbps, but I don’t see that 40 mbps is even a tier right now. My first bill was actually $36 ($6 for a partial month), but this month it was down to a flat $30 again.
Another year was ending with Xfinity. Last year as Peacock was rolling out they had an offer where if I agreed to add an Xfinity box to my TV, they would give me $10 and Peacock service for free (not the version without commercials, but not the one that is free either), so I did that. I never use it and now I have a Peacock app on my TV so I don’t really need the box.
Anyway, it was time to re-up and I was thinking I might have to upgrade the speed to get a discount, but they went ahead and gave me the same deal again, 25 Mbps for $30 a month. Really it measures out closer to 30 Mbps. That started this month. Then I got an email from them last week saying they were upgrading my speed from 25 Mbps to 50 Mbps for no charge. To make it effective, I just needed to restart my modem, and the speed measured about 57 Mbps. So yay! I think that was a nationwide thing. That gives me a little room for error since 4k streaming needs about 25 Mbps.