What are my options for home internet service in Savannah, GA?

May 26, 2013 4:35 PM

Home DSL service has been declining in quality and stability in recent months, and I'm at the point where it's time to consider canceling and switching to a different provider. Search engine pages seem to be spammed with fake "index" sites." What are my options? If you use ATT or Comcast, how has your service worked?
posted by CBrachyrhynchos to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Comcast was a good ISP for me in California for several years. I've switched to a local small company because I moved to a house where the local phone exchange is across the street so ADSL is very fast for me. Comcast's internet was fast and reliable and I'd happily go back to them unless some other company offered fiber. I used ATT for a while, no real complaints but Comcast were faster.
posted by anadem at 5:08 PM on May 26, 2013

See if you can get AT&T U-Verse . I'm very happy with my bundle.
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 5:29 PM on May 26, 2013

Best answer: When I canceled my DSL with AT&T and they told me they didn't need the DSL hardware back, my household took turns taking a sledgehammer to it as a means of venting frustration with months of piss-poor customer service.

In the years since, we've been quite happy with Comcast.
posted by radwolf76 at 5:32 PM on May 26, 2013

Best answer: Seconding AT&T Uverse if it's available in your area. I live in a very small town about 30 miles west of Charlotte, so I'm betting it's available in Savannah. They have different internet speeds available depending on your needs and it's much faster than DSL. Also, officially they have data caps, but I go over mine every single month and have never gotten so much as a letter.

I like having my cable and phone bundled with my internet and the cable and phone service is really reliable. But I'm pretty certain you can just get the internet if you want.
posted by katyggls at 5:42 PM on May 26, 2013

I've been happy with SBC (now AT&T) for years and years. I had to have one DSL modem replaced after a thunderstorm apparently did just enough damage. There have been the usual outages, sometimes seemingly weather-related, other times we just have several throughout a given day. But it's nearly always re-connected automatically. Recently something must have changed as we've been having outages that are very, very short after which reconnecting is nearly instantaneous -- i.e. in the course of typing this comment I could have heard the "boop" as my PC sensed the modem disconnecting as a hardware device, the click as the modem reboots, and by the time I'm ready to hit post I'm back online.

Never have bandwidth issues and I watch a lot of Netflix.

The one issue I've had is needing to use a public DNS instead of the one at my ISP, and this leads to some odd connection issues with mostly really popular web addresses like google.com. But for the most part that's an inconvenience only.

When some people have DSL issues, they've escalated and escalated support calls until it gets resolved, which can (still) take months. I've heard of people getting the company to replace the last-mile wiring, or getting themselves switched to another node. If your choices are few (and they often are) it may be worth angling for.
posted by dhartung at 1:33 AM on May 27, 2013

Best answer: Unfortunately, here in Savannah the only options for home internet are Comcast and ATT. Several of my friends have had a lot of problems with Comcast, and they don't offer internet only service, so a couple of years ago I tried ATT. It was a neverending pain, I spent probably 50 hours on the phone with them. They set up the service at the wrong address, billed me for it, etc. etc. Once they got the address right, and the spelling of my not very complicated name right, it still took two months for the service to start working. A few months later I moved to another house two blocks away. The previous tenant had ATT so it should have been easy for them to move my service there. I gave up after a month of waiting.



I did just get junk mail from them offering UVERSE.
posted by mareli at 5:00 AM on May 27, 2013

Best answer: Comcast does offer internet-only service. I've had good results with them downtown. I moved into a hundred-year-old building and had a spotty connection at first, but they sent a tech out and redid the wiring to the pole. I pay about 70 dollars per month (including modem rental and fees) for 20mbps per month and speedtest.net says I get abot 27.5mbps.
posted by arcolz at 12:20 PM on May 30, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks for the responses. We're considering our options.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:48 AM on May 31, 2013