AT&T to Pay You Money Back For Your Slow DSL

They should be paying all their wireless customers back for their horrendous network.

Take that, AT&T!

So basically, AT&T is paying $2 to any customer willing to lie about the quality of their service, or too ignorant to realize that having nine or ten torrents running while streaming HD porn is going to slow down your internet.

Huh, 3.75 minllion charitable to who... are they trying to say "We are sorry to screw our customers but here is 3.75 million to charity because we care". This doesn't make sence to me at all.

Now for Comcast!

Just because you like to run 10 HD pr0n torrents download everyday, that doesn't mean everyone else is doing the same. So don't easily call others as ignorant.

So I get $2
Some charity gets $3.75 million
and some lawyer gets $11 million?!!?

Crap. Now my ATT service is going to go up to pay for another ridiculous lawsuit.

Att did a mediocre job in the past and now competitiors have come up in the marketplace as a result.

How fast should I *really* be able to DL with a 768k connection? The highest I've seen is about 300 on steam. Am I getting ripped off? Should I ask for money?

This makes me hate lawyers.

Please kill the flash ads so I can read an article.

A lot of people don't realize that ISPs rate their connection speeds in kilo*bits* per second and 99% of stuff on the computer lists speeds as kilobyte per second.

Of course I'm sure their speeds were still slower then they should have been in a lot of cases. I know I've seen more then a few Qwest DSL modems that don't connect near the mediocre 1.5Mbs they are selling it as. And of course so do a lot of cable companies, and since *up to* includes 0... well they aren't making any guarantee at all...

Finally, those who said that they experienced slower speeds but AT&T believes received the service they paid for will be eligible for a single $2 payment.


Emphasis on "but AT&T believes received the service they paid for". In other words, AT&T makes the decision on who gets money back. For all we know, AT&T will give a single $2 payment to anyone that claims it and say they "believed" the customer was receiving the service he/she paid for.

Why not switch to a different browser where you can block ads and scripts (I'm using Firefox with AdBlock and NoScript and have no issues at all)

To get your approximate actual download speeds, you should take the speed number your service gives you, divide by 8, and subtract 20% of the result. This is because they are advertising in Kilobits/s rather than the Kilobytes per second that are actually used outside sneaky advertising. There are 8 bits in a byte. The 20% is because that is around the average amount the signal will degrade while traveling to your house over copper wires. Of course, the source of your download can also affect your speed. This is just a ballpark figure that should give you an idea of around what to expect, not an exact number.

Example:
3 Mb/s (3000 kb/s) Internet -> 3000 / 8 = 375
375 * .2 = 75
375 - 75 = 300 Kilobytes/second

I have had AT&T DSL Service since 2005, I have absolutely no complaints and they have always delivered great broadband, but it hasn't always been AT&T either, before it was Bellsouth. So I will not be lying to get $2.00.

DATA rates are usually in kb and not KB. Look at 10/100/1000...all of those are in bits not bytes. So it isn't sneaky advertising.

That long ago? That's my whole lifetime.

My AT&T 6meg service isn't that bad IMHO, 650+ down & 80(+or- a few) up for $47 a month. (That includes my land line)

...then again I'm 4 blocks from the CO.

P.S. I haven't gotten a single piracy letter since I switched from Charter!

HELL YEAH! i get my 2 dollars back.

@dunderklumpton:
You need to get some companies to lay out some fios in your area. I pay $60/mo (granted, that's more than $47) and get 50mbit/50mbit. I don't want to seem like I'm bragging, but areas where people think 6mbit is good really need to get working on their infrastructure.

Oh yeah, and so I at least have a little bit on topic - I had AT&T DSL about 10 years ago, and to be perfectly honest, they delivered every bit of bandwidth they said they would. No complaints on that.

Anyone who really cares about a one-time $2 payment is as lame as the paperboy on "Better Off Dead".

Two dollars. Two dollars! I want my two dollars!

Seriously? People marked my comment as spam... I would have thought that explaining how to calculate what internet speed should be when downloading was pretty relevant and helpful.

I've never seen a browser not label downloads in KB/s.

I've seen several download accelerators that change you to Kb/s in order to make you think your net is faster though. Next you'll be telling me that 1000 kilobytes in a megabyte isn't clever marketing just because they usually label them that way.

the only winner here is the legal group, AT&T loses money, you gain barely anything

One good lie deserves another

You are right, they do it cause kb numbers are much bigger then the actual KB number and people who don't know the difference will be impressed and go for the bigger number. It's the same reason a lot of prices have 99 cents at the end, cause $9.99 looks like a better deal then $10.00 (that one is just in reverse).

I've moved around quite a bit. I have yet to see any service provider actually deliver their claimed data transmission rates. I'm beginning to think it is impossible.

I paid for their 6meg service and eventually in the fall things went down to 3meg. The technician came out and said I was too far to get thsat service to begin with. I didn't change to the 3mb service because I would bet my dl speed would decrease.

Odd that this week my speeds went up to 4.5. So I had suspicions of them capping the speed.

I don't think the lawsuit will hurt them as much as people got tired of it and switched to cable. Once people have consistent cable service, they never go back to DSL.

We call it Concast.

Wooooow , 2 bucks!!!!

/sarcasm/

I'm not giving all that private information for a freggin 2.90$/month... hopefully Skynet(google) wins the broadband wars!

I believe transfers over the Internet use 10 bit "bytes" though, because of a start and end bit. So there's some useless data being transferred along with the actual packet which means the speed that you download the actual data at is lower than it could be, even excluding packet loss from a bad line.

Anyway, people complaining about speeds that are lower than they paid for don't understand the technology they signed up for. DSL attenuates over distance. If you live 4 miles from the local phone exchange and paid for an 8mbit line you'll be lucky to see 2mb. AT&T can't correct that aside from lying down a higher gauge line, but a simpler fix would be to simply move your house closer to the exchange.

Of course if you live within 1 mile and still see very poor speeds then you have a better case, but even then this can be caused by any number of other factors which are outside of the control of the ISP.