AKICILJ/DW: Bundling telecom services for the home

[thatcrazycajun]

The housing search having finally been successfully (we hope) concluded, Your Humble Correspondent and his Songbird are now considering whether to bundle cable TV, high-speed Internet and voice-phone services in the new apartment. Has anyone on the list done this and found it worthwhile? Is Comcast preferable to AT&T or vice versa, or is there another provider who beats them both? I speak not merely of monetary savings, but installation, customer service (or lack thereof), quality of the services (good or bad) and overall impressions. Please post your experience here if you have done this.

Comments

[beki.livejournal.com]

I don't have an opinion one way or the other, but I do work in telecomm. I suggest a land line simply because if the power goes out, you will not have phone service if you have any of the VOIP type services. Cable providers have to provide "best effort" service. Therefore, if things go down, it's too bad so sad. Your regular phone service will work even when the power goes out, assuming you don't have a fancy phone that requires more than being plugged into a phone jack. The MOS score on the call quality is less too.

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

On the other hand...do you really *need* a landline? You both have mobile phones, and as long as there's good service there, that really can do you. kitanzi and I dropped our landline some months ago, and have yet to miss it.

I have Comcast service here, and I have no real issues with it. I had Bellsouth DSL in the previous appoint, and it was likewise fine. I don't know how AT&T's TV service is, however.

[beki.livejournal.com]

I have one land line in case of emergencies. AFAIK, your cell phone is too much trouble for 911 to track you down in case of emergency. I've not seen emergency services triangulate or use a smart phone's GPS to locate someone in case of emergency. YMMV of course, but it is something to consider. I have two disabled people in my household, so my situation is different from most.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

We are not (as you know) in Atlanta, but I wanted to note that Time Warner Cable has been surprisingly good both in terms of installation and service (save for one or two phone assistants who stuck to the script even when I supplied the next five answers on it). Also, knock on wood, they are so far an ISP that doesn't have an explicit cap on monthly traffic if you purchase "unlimited". Sure, AT&T's 250GB/month looks high, but wait until you start streaming movies for a couple of weekends, and download OS patches, a couple of concerts, a few albums, and that 5K text file you remember from Usenet. (Okay, that last is more along the lines of "the straw that broke the camel's back, but still :-)

Likewise, if you're talking about a mobile provider, AT&T is capped, while Verizon is, technically, not. (If the cap were physically impossible to reach, I'd still object on principle, so take all of this with a mineful of salt.)

Good luck finding someone sympatico.

[runnerwolf.livejournal.com]

Comcast is capped. That is part of why I just left them (note I am in Seattle).

The big part was my service would occasionally go out for no reason, after 3 service calls I gave up.

When I called to cancel the guy spent 10 minutes (it would have been more but I got pushy) explaining how their service was great and I really should have kept trying to work with them in a tone not dissimilar to that you would use explaining try, try again to a 4 year old.

I also had problems because I had a Windows Home Server System and since they don't have scripts for that most of my service calls took 2-3x as long.

I have no experience with AT&T. I just switched over to Verizon aka Frontier a few weeks ago, and so far it works great.

[filkferengi]

You should talk to Dave & Signe; they have the comcast bundled internet, etc.