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Mark Lewis and his wife bought a house in Winterville, Georgia, in August 2012. They figured getting Internet service would be as simple as calling up AT&T, because the prior owners had AT&T DSL (Digital Subscriber Line). The neighbors also have AT&T DSL service providing about 3Mbps.
"The previous owners had left their DSL modem and everything in the house," Lewis told Ars. But when he called AT&T, the company said they were "at maximum capacity, but if someone else in your neighborhood terminates their service that should open up something for you."
In October 2013, two of Lewis' neighbors moved out, and he called AT&T to see if that opened up a spot for him. The answer was no. It continues to be no.
Lewis isn't alone. Nearly a decade after AT&T promised the US government that it would bring broadband Internet service to 100 percent of its wireline telephone territory, many people who are desperate for AT&T Internet face a maddening problem. They can get AT&T phone service through the DSL-capable copper cables coming into their homes, their neighbors have DSL Internet service from AT&T, but they themselves cannot get wired Internet service because AT&T claims its network is full.
A handful of people like Lewis, people who have been refused DSL service by AT&T, contacted Ars after we last wrote about AT&T's broadband shortcomings. Together, these stories highlight a confounding situation involving minimal oversight, miscommunication, and millions of customers left with sub-broadband speeds or no Internet service at all.
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Interesting) by ollonk on Wednesday June 17 2015, @05:20AM
I live in a rural area where none of the big players ever bothered to invest. The local telephone company is a cooperative (technically owned collectively by its customers). In te early days they started offering dial-up services, and when none of the usual Telcoms entered the market, they became the only ISP around. The speeds are disappointing for the money and the other options are laughable, but I never realized how good we have it here. We pay more than 50 USD monthly for 8mb down and 1.5mb up, but hey, it's not AT&T or Comcast. Are these common in other places, or is this an oddity?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17 2015, @01:25PM
We got lucky and had a private telco take over a local failed fiber startup, who managed to provide service in a lot of areas ATT and the predecessor it gobbled up failed to. We had substandard DSL for 3 years, despite paying full price (We were well outside the acceptable range of the DSLAM, and while it would work, certain times of the day/week the connection would go down due to interference.) on the promise that 'ATT would be rolling out improved service as soon as the local branch exchange was replaced with fiber and a DSLAM installed for your area. From what I heard from people who still had ATT DSL 10-15 years later, the speeds are the same as the ones I had back around 2000, while my replacement ISP has upgraded our service at least twice (despite having extremely thin profit margins, to the point where a merger and consolidation was necessary to reduce overhead, including the former CEO/owner of the 'local' ISP writing himself out.)