AT&T oversubscribed their service.

[Crabber85]

For any of you like me who have AT&T high speed DSL or Uverse internet your likely suffering with unexplainable speed slowdowns and random sevice outages and I have the answers.These facts have been confirmed over at ATT support forums, basically AT&T has been over selling its services across the entire country and since 2007 and has now passed the limit of their service network being horrible over burdend which has prompted them to initiate a data cap on both types of internet service that they offer basic ADSL has a limit or cap of 150 GB or Giga Bytes per month and Uverse susbcribers have a 200 GB data cap.Now they aren't inforcing these limits just yet but they will start in the next few months, this according to their own FAQ page "We will begin monitoring your data usage when your area is brought into this monitoring service and for the first month that we monitor you we will let you go over the data cap but the second month you will be issued an email or a letter via the US postal service letting you know that you are either currently over your limit or that your approaching it.On the third month you will be issued another email or letter but still will not be charged.On the fourth month you will still be issued an email or letter but you will encurr a $10 fee for every 50GB you go over.After the fourth month every subsequent month you go over you will be fined an additional $10 which can bring your rate up from $19.95 to $59.95 your service speed will not increase as result of the higher payment."I live at home with my parents due to certian physical issues and they pay for the internet we are supposed to be getting a minimum of 6MBPS or megabits per second for our download and upload speeds but we've been experiencing a slow down on both every since we got the service started in 09'.We were paying $19.95 a month then it kept going up each year and now we are paying $49.95 it doesn't make sense that our speeds keep decreasing but our plan rate keeps getting more expensive and no we aren't incurring overages yet as that wasn't even in effect until the end of 2013.I recently foudn out that the DSLAM or central servers for each district covered by ATT have been getting increasingly overloaded over the last three years due to ATT bringing on way too many new customers without having expanded the avaiable bandwidth or even adding in new DSLAM centers so all of us are now experiencing degraded service as evident by the more than 300% slow down in available speeds and when peak usage time hits typically between twelve pm and twelve am our speeds are further degraded due to an excess amount of traffic trying to get through an already overloaded DSLAM which ends up with our routers completely failing to connect to the internet and leaving us with no service for hours at a time.ATT has basically gotten a monopoly or even an ogolopoly as some have said because they have bought out nearly all of their local competitors and have purchased the sole rights to bring service to certain areas leaving us with no options.The statistic according to ATT support is that ATT actually holds over 90% of the high speed internet subscriptions in the US which means they effectively have 90% of the countries subscribers under contract with them.My parents are actively looking for an alternative but so far we haven't been able to find another internet service provider that actually services the area.

[Crabber85]

I've been doing regular speed tests using sites like Testmy.net and Speedtest.net and my results have been interesting to say the least.We are now supposed to be getting 768Kbps on our down load speed and 168Kbps on our upload but the tests have not confirmed what even our router/modem is saying its set to get.The average score for my download speed is 500Kbps and for upload it stays pretty close to 90kbps unless its high or peak usage hours then it typically tests 170Kbps for the download and 14-20Kbps for the upload.I have two tests literally taken seconds apart with a speed discrepancy of 3% on both up and download speeds and I've got tests from low usage hours and peak usage hours with a more than 300% discrepancy because of how much the bandwidth in my general area fluctuates from minute to minute.To make 1 megabit you'd need 1024 kilobits so for a 6 megabit speed rate I should be showing 6124 kilobits give or take since my router/modem on shows kilobits for my speed rates.I'm getting 0.08 of a megabit for my download and 0.01 for my upload does this sound fair or right to anybody? My parents are paying for the mid tier speed package and we aren't even getting bottom tier speeds because of how overloaded the area network is so they are getting ripped off and we have no body to turn to as Comcast, Verizon and Charter wont service the area citing the we are just to far from the city and that if they tried to bring service out to us it would be just as bad as what we have.I think AT&T has bought the service rights to the area and essentially blocked the other service providers from entering the area.Everybody around me in my neighborhood and for miles outside of it are using AT&T for their internet service and when everybody comes home from work the first thing they do is get on Face Book or Pintrest and start clogging up the local DSLAM so at five sharp every day our router/modem looses it connection to the internet for at least an hour which means I have to do a power reset on it to get it to even attempt to try to re-connect and most times that works for a few minutes then the little service light goes back to blinking red again.I like to do a little online gaming with my Xbox-360 but because the service is horrible out here and during peak usage hours worse than useless I can't do chat parties so I can talk with people or even stay in any match for more than few minutes before I get disconnected. I was actually informed over at Xbox.com support that my bandwidth wasn't even enough to get the dashboard to load up on the console let alone play in an online match and the support techs didn't even know how I was able to do anything like check emails or get on here and suggested that I look into suing AT&T because they have been in breach of our contract since 2010 when they started throttling our speeds back and charging us more. Like I said in my first post I've been doing my research and have been reading through tons of posts over at AT&T support forums and I can tell you they have a lot I mean a lot of angry customers and if they don't do something quick this may be their last year in business as the majority of their subscribers are going else where for better cheaper service.

[jenok]

I like the breach of contract idea. A group should get together and do a lawsuit over this whole mess or boycott .

[Crabber85]

@jenok, what makes matters worse is AT&T is currently in negotiations to buy out Time Warner and Cox Communications which means all of the accounts each of those service providers currently have will be enveloped by AT&T and the type of service will be degraded from cable based to land line(phone line)so these newly bought out accounts will go from good service to service that is on the order of 400-500 times worse just because of the transition away from fiber optic cables. Everybody's hoping that these two buyouts fail because AT&T doesn't need to have that much more of the internet subscriber base under their thumb.I would love to see AT&T get a huge class action lawsuit put against them but the likelihood of that happening is slim because were talking about a corporation that has a team of lawyers who deal with this kind of thing year round.Not to mention the fact because they have such tight control on the market right now if you decide to drop their service due to increasingly low speeds your house is then marked as non-serviceable and your basically put on a black list that will keep you from ever getting internet service with them or anyone else again.