Service & Support: 2 ¾ Stars
Sometimes it isn't how often your service disappoints you, but how your ISP treats you when it does that makes the difference. Support was rated the number-one factor when choosing an ISP, according to our surveyed AT&T customers, and that category received the company's second-best satisfaction rating just above 2 ¾ (2.79) stars.
Customer satisfaction is another hard subject to properly gauge, with reputable studies on the matter being scarce. However, J.D. Power rated AT&T as having the highest customer satisfaction in the western region of the U.S. in its September 2014 "Residential Internet Service Provider Satisfaction" study. With our survey score approaching three stars, some of our readers seemed to agree with that assessment.
"Overall, AT&T has been responsive to issues reported to them," said one of our survey entrants. "In the day and age of fiber optics being a norm, charging $55 for 24 Mb/s is robbery," said another price-conscious consumer. The commenter went on to admit, "However, they do have reliable service and decent customer service."
Some readers disagreed wholeheartedly, lambasting the company for a combination of alleged missed appointments, long phone waits and billing issues. Many readers who rated support below three stars detailed a plethora of issues, including defective equipment, outsourced customer support and a feeling of being unimportant to the company.
"[The service is] good overall, but a little pricey for the speeds, given that when something happens, you are a number and not a person," said one customer in our survey.
We have all been there. When our technology fails us, it's never at a convenient time, it never comes back up fast enough and and it's never an important enough issue to the people on the other side of the phone. It could be said all service providers at one point or another have let us down, and likely will again. However, with a score of 2 ¾ stars, our readers ranked AT&T's support slightly above average, and a decent majority of our readers who gave lower scores to performance and price seemed to rate support at three stars or higher.