{"id":3830,"date":"2019-04-06T18:13:39","date_gmt":"2019-04-06T22:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/?p=3830"},"modified":"2019-04-12T10:34:34","modified_gmt":"2019-04-12T14:34:34","slug":"to-xfinity-and-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/2019\/04\/to-xfinity-and-beyond\/","title":{"rendered":"To Xfinity and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

My introductory year<\/a> of AT&T U-verse fiber internet at $40 was over. The price would have gone up to $50 per month for 50 Mbps service, but I called them to see if they would keep my rate at $40. They said they don’t do any service for less than $50, but if I upgraded to 100 Mbps service I could get that for $50 for a year. I knew Comcast had plans for $40, so I said no thanks, please cancel my account when it expires. But they said I could only cancel at the end of a billing cycle which was April 8 (originally got service March 12, 2018) so I would need to pay them nearly a month at the new higher rate to avoid a cancellation fee. That really made me mad. There is no way in the world they can’t make plenty of money by leaving that wire hooked up to my house and having me pay them $40 every month, but whatever.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Since now I had nearly one extra month of service, I didn’t need to sign up with Comcast yet, but as it got within 10 days or so, I started shopping deals and found Comcast Xfinity for $30 per month for 25 Mbps service, which is the minimum for streaming 4K content (they also had 60 Mbps for $40). I think it may be better to start at the lower speed not only to save $10, but in a year it might allow me to get an upgrade for another year at $40. They don’t allow discounted downgrades. I already had a Comcast compatible cable modem from the last time I was with them<\/a>, so I didn’t have to pay a fee for that and I think I had to agree to automatic payments and electronic billing (which I would do anyway). Since it was still over a week off, I was able to pick a weekend appointment for installation, so I wouldn’t have to miss work and use vacation time.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Knowing I would switch and that my old wifi router didn’t provide a good signal to the TV room, I went ahead and bought a 802.11ac router for $48. Plus I had to pay $70 for installation, so that’s a cost of switching, but the new plan will pay for itself in 6 months compared to doing nothing and paying $50 with AT&T.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

They showed up in their window of 10-12 today. Their box was still attached to the side of the house, but a storm had knocked a tree down on their old cable, so they had to string a new cable to the house. Still he was probably done in about an hour. The speed through the router and ethernet is right at 30 Mbps and I can get 25 Mbps over wifi in the TV room using the 5GHz band (that band isn’t supposed to work as well through walls, but is much faster and less crowded than the 2.4 GHz band; the router broadcasts two different wifi signals). The only downside is the upload speed is only 2.5 Mbps, which is pretty awful. It’s not like I upload much, but AT&T’s fiber line had the same speed for download and upload. All I had to do was move the ethernet cable from the AT*&T modem to the cable modem and I was pretty much set (Comcast still had to do some kind of authorization of the account which took a few minutes, but the technician took care of that). Pretty easy switch.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My introductory year of AT&T U-verse fiber internet at $40 was over. The price would have gone up to $50 per month for 50 Mbps service, but I called them to see if they would keep my rate at $40. They said they don’t do any service for less than $50, but if I upgraded … Continue reading “To Xfinity and Beyond”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3830"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3848,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3830\/revisions\/3848"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}