I have been a UVerse internet & phone customer since March 2010 and before that was a DSL customer with Bellsouth/AT&T. Recently Comcast was in the area doing a promotion, so I signed up for their 30-day trial. UVerse in my neighborhood is limited to 18Mbps so I wanted to test drive Xfinity's 50MBps as well as their phone service. I kept UVerse active while trying Xfinity in case I didn't like Comcast.
The bottom line, after 17 days I am dropping Comcast and sticking with UVerse, and thought I would share my experience in case it helps others. Some background: I'm in a South Florida neighborhood (Pompano Beach area) built in the early 1970's and we have old Bellsouth pedestals in our yards (and mine is OLD).
The UVerse VRAD in the middle of the neighborhood is anywhere from 700 to 3000 feet from my house (depending on which way the underground cabling gets from the VRAD to my house). I do not have Uverse TV or any cable, just internet & phone. I also have an alarm system that uses dial-up to communicate to the central station. AT&T told me they cannot do 24Mbps in this neighborhood, so the highest I can go is 18.
The biggest reason I'm staying with UVerse: RELIABILITY. Since switching to UVerse from DSL in March 2010, it has gone down ONCE, and even then I just had to cycle power to the UVerse router. It's just rock solid reliable, even with the lousy pedestal in my yard that used to give us fits with standard DSL. It's pretty stable at around 16-18 Mbps and bad weather never affects it. Phone calls always work and never have noise. Alarm system has never had problems using the line. Anonymous call reject works mostly well (some oddball numbers like "1" still get through) and I can block up to 20 numbers.
The biggest reason to stay with Xfinity: 50MBps. However my family didn't notice a huge difference (they're all non-techies) and even complained to me that some pages loaded slower or not at all. I noticed faster replication with Lotus Notes on my company's VPN, and pages do seem to load faster, but nothing earth shattering. Video streaming on Youtube and Amazon Prime had no difference between the two. The phone sometimes had some IP-phone-sounding noise on it (i.e. choppy, small noise bursts, etc), but nothing major, yet noticable since UVerse never had any of this. Anonymous call reject does seem to work better (no weird numbers getting through) but you're limited to 16 numbers blocked.
I was ready to cancel UVerse, but on the 17th day, Comcast had an area outage for at least 3 hours starting around 9pm. During that time we had no phone or internet, which also meant no alarm central station monitoring. It made me realize how stable UVerse had been and that we've never had an outage like this. I was away on a trip and thought about my family - what if someone broke in? 911 would only be available by cellphone, if they could reach it.
So for me, the slower but steady & reliable UVerse is staying. I don't know how reliable it is elsewhere but it works great here. This is hard for me because I WANT faster speed! I really wanted Xfinity to work, and I might keep just the internet part (trying to figure out how to justify the extra cost of having both!). I read today that AT&T is testing faster speeds in other markets, so I have hopes that this will result in them upping speeds to 45 Mbps here sometime in the future.
Anyway I hope this helps those trying to decide which service to use for internet and phone.
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