AT&T or Time Warner Cable?

AT&T just laid mad fiber optic cable in my neighborhood. They're going door-to-door offering services and doing price analysis. Bottom line is they say they could save me about $25/month on my cable/internet services.

I'd lose home phone, but I haven't used it in years anyway. They'd bump my internet speed to 6Mbps. And they claim that their 3Mbps service runs twice as fast as TW's 5Mbps (current). Difference is that it's a dedicated line. The DVR service is enticing because my record time would go from 40 hours to 140 hours and I could record 4 at a time as opposed to the current 2.

I've been FAIRLY happy with Time Warner in that the service has been pretty solid, but their technical support and customer service are simply awful.

So... any thoughts on AT&T service?

Good to have a choice though.

Seriously... my "standards" for any telcom company are pretty low these days.

If you stick with Time Warner and RoadCrawler, then I suggest 2 things. 1) tell them you're going to defect to AT&T and see what they can offer you, and 2) I suspect you have a regular DVR box... if you do ask them to swap it out for a HD box... we have one but we don't have HD TV (yet)... HD DVRs have higher capacity, to record 40 hours of HD content. SD content takes up less space ... therefore more room for "regular" programming. Plus if there's a technical problem on one of the SD channels and they have a HD channel with the same programme, then you can switch to watch that channel. Also 3) RoadCrawler has a 8Mbps service. Ask them for a deal on that too.

If you switch to AT&T then it's OK I guess... my father-in-law has a choice of what I used to call Bellshite or Bellshite. The good thing they did is DSL his phone line. Time Warner won't even come down the road (uncabled road, "fairly rural"), and they get quite a fast connection on it. Of course no TV (copper phone line) so DirecTV is their TV provider.

I've heard good things about the U-Verse service... so it don't hurt to try. Plus Time Warner Cable will be over quite quickly should you change your mind.

Mark.

The AT&T HD offering is greater. I think the service uptime will be identical; Time Warner leases the lines from AT&T. Hell, my TW service may improve with all of the upgrades AT&T has done in the area.

I'll be calling TW tomorrow to let them know that I am being wooed by competition. It is nice to have choices. I was living in another state when the FCC opened it up and my community worked with three providers at the time. I actually had 5Mbps through the now defunct "AT&T @ Home" in 1998 which was really rare and revolutionary at the time. Their digital cable was amazing (we could order food for delivery, ffs!!) Napster was in its heyday then... ah, memories. I have a dish on my house that was here when I moved but I have heard nothing but bad things about service outages.

Anyhow, thanks for the input, I'll be weighing my options.