AT&T and world domination

Ma Bell has been put back together again. And of course, we the customers lose on the deal. It's sad for any Atlanta-area resident to drive through Midtown to see that the huge "BellSouth" building now has the familiar stylized globe and the letters "AT & T" at the top, rather than the comforting "BellSouth" brand name. The Cingular Wireless building in Sandy Springs no longer has the kooky little orange guy made out of an X. At least they didn't put an AT&T Wireless sign there. Yet.

When we moved to the area 4 years ago, we tried cable for our TV and internet. BellSouth had not made DSL available for our particular suburb yet, so we had very little choice when it came to high-speed internet. The cable was supposedly "digital" which means a relatively high quality picture. Not HD, but pretty high quality anyway. Well, the local channels were pretty clear, but as you flipped through the channels, it got worse and worse. By the time you got up to the premium channels, the picture quality was as bad as if I had been using a rabbit-ears antenna. While watching TV, the picture would go away completely for about two seconds. This would happen rather consistently, about every three minutes. Imagine watching a movie while that's going on.
As for the cable "high-speed" internet, since we lived in a populous area, and DSL was not an option yet, everybody who had high-speed, had cable. And, with cable, if you are in a "Charter Cable" area, you have to have Charter. If you are in a Comcast Cable area, you have to have Comcast, etc. So, we're in a populous area where everyone with high-speed internet was using Charter Communications cable internet.

I don't know if you know this or not, but the way cable works is that you and your neighbors all pull your signal off the same line. Now, with internet, that means that the more people you have pulling off the signal, the slower it goes. When the cable company says you have the "3Mps" speed, that means that is the highest possible speed of the signal when it leaves the origination point. It's not anywhere near that when it gets to your house, especially if more people are pulling off the signal. So our cable internet was slower than dial-up internet most of the time.

Why all the boring backstory?

Our DSL has been slowing down intermittently lately. We have the 6Mbps speed, but ever since AT&T took over BellSouth, we have seen crappier service than ever before. Sometimes we'll pick up the phone and there is no dialtone. Sometimes we just lose the internet altogether, then it's back a few minutes later. When your DSL is as slow and unreliable as cable, that's when you have a big problem.

This has only been since AT&T took control of our beloved BellSouth, though. we had very few problems prior to that. Ugh. Can't we get good customer service anywhere?