Good evening all I hope this finds everyone with their desired Mbps both down and up and your Latency is so good you can feel it moving around in your pocket.
99.9% of me wants to take off and lay down my fiery rant but that .01% of me says I might get better assistance if I come out of the gate treating those who may be able to help like I prefer to be treated so bear with me it has been a long day at the office but I am home and happy to have been pointed in the direction of this website.
I have a tendency to ramble as I sit behind a computer all day for the most part selling and some think I am crazy to want to come home sometimes and jump right back on the computer and play my favorite online game Battlefield. Yeah I am a big kid 42 married 20 years together with my wife for 28 yrs and we have three awesome lovley daughters who eat bandwidth like candy.
We recently bought a new house and are coming from Charter in the Spring Lake/Grand Haven area of Michigan if anyone if familiar with that area of Michigan and moved into a somewhat rural house 20 miles east of Spring Lake into a small billing address of Marne, MI. Great move for us, more property for me to mow and a larger house for my wife and I to clean. Plus side is I am exactly 3.9 miles from my work and my wife being a Public School Teacher is the closest she has ever been to her work place and best yet my daughters are centralized within a 15 mile radius of all their friends and most of the sporting events and extra curricular activities that they participate in so maybe we will lower the amount of tire sets and fuel purchases we are use to spending and buying and hopefully be able to give it to a proper internet service.
Before you ask yes I did my diligence on what services were available at this house a month before moving as well as weeks and 2 days before and was told each time by every AT&T representative that cable TV was not available at my address (which is fine) but every package of Uverse internet was available except for a package that was at this time proprietary to the state of Texas?
So a week before the move I ordered my equipment and enrolled in what I thought was the middle of the road plan "PRO" 3 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Now mind you I had 60+ Mbps down with Charter 20 miles west and cable TV but who cares about TV when we are focusing on the internet. I thought OK I would start with "PRO and I could always upgrade. Like getting a hair cut you cannot put it back on once it has been cut so.... Not doing my diligence on exactly what or "where" the fiber optic ran I thought latency is one of the most important thing for me in gaming so 3 down and 1 up will be good enough and fiber optic man it will be blazing. I will be the best grenade thrower in Michigan if not the fastest.
Well I found that with the "PRO" service and my PC being plugged in direct and not a wireless connection that I had almost the same latency as what I had with Charter around 22-37 depending on servers. Uffff what just happened? I just got banned from a server because my latency went from 26 on this particular server to over 500!! PING.. PING... I thought I was alone be I come out of the office to find my eldest daughter decided to come home from University (after all the hardcore moving of a house has been done and reloaded into a new house) Just connected to the WIFI network.
I was befuddled and thought that cant be right. I have top of the line hardware and some of the best routers you can get and the AT&T hardware is brand new something inst right. So I mess about for a while trying different things and still with 1 iPhone connected my latency to the gaming server is plain terrible. Worst yet simple pages like trying to pull up Google reminded me of old school AOL when it was cool to go into chat rooms and have marital a never mind but yes pages loading slower than dial up?? No way I thought this is 2014 everyone is tuned in and dropping calls like Timothy Leary said.
So I call customer service and get probably the coolest and best customer service representative I have had the privilege to work with since the 17th of Oct. names Reece on Halloween night. he tried everything he could do to transfer me for 2 hours to upgrade my service. I cant even begin to tell you how horrible every single sales rep and tech rep have been. I sell service for a living and if I ever and I would never because it inst my nature but I would fire myself for lacking the passion that every single one of the people I have talked to at AT&T except for Reece who I am quite sure is from India or Pakistan originally and I don't know where he lives now but if he worked in my company and I had a structure or lack of like AT&T I would promote that gentleman.
Sir we are sorry to tell you that "PRO" is the highest internet package available in your area. 3 down and 1 up? You joking I have old each one. Before we moved and we would have moved anyways but at least I wouldn't have been so disappointed if I wasn't told on several occasions and have the actual text for the very first night of activation that states Me: If I find that "PRO" is not a fast enough service there are higher speed packages available right? AT&T Rep: Yes Mr. Robert just call our sales phone line and they will take care of that for you or I can even do that now for you if you wish? Me: No lets just get it up and running and let us try out the Fiber Optic service and decide after we have seen what happens.
So revert back up to the ramblings and no "PRO" is not good enough and come to find out we cannot upgrade to a higher speed package. I have paid $149.00 for a tech to come out only to tell me nothing is wrong it is the lack of speed lol which I knew all along but sometimes I am wrong ; )
So in short people and I am trying to make light and be humorous a bit about it even though I am butt hurt as they say. This is the first time that I feel I have been blatantly lied to on several occasions, I have not seen such STRANGE and most unprofessional customer service in my life and I say STRANGE in caps because when you call for sales or they transfer you it is like they are transferring you to someone who is at his house cooking or doing something other than focusing on serving the customer! Me! You! I am dumb founded that they are still in business.
We are one of the easiest going polite family's ever. I never ever once even told any of them how terrible they are at their job just because I need help. Kinda like fast food you don't want to bring that cheeseburger back because you fear they might spit in it type of thought process. I made certain to tell Reece the one and only customer service person who in my opinion has a future ahead of him probably in whatever he chooses to do. being new to the boards here I have no idea what type of response nor from whom but if AT&T monitors this at all but if so be sure to thank Reece for your pay check because he probably saves more people from leaving the service straight away and at least gives them some hope to hand on a full month which we are approaching.
To anyone else who is close or in a similar situation and have some guidance please by all means skip the above read and let me know what my options are? Hell I have a tractor and will gig the ditch for the cable company. I am 1/4 of a mile from the pick of 3-4 other cable and internet company's so I guess I do not get it. No one from AT&T has been able to explain or even hint as to why that if I have PRO or any service at all why cant I upgrade? I will buy whatever equipment I need.
I don't know it is very frustrating and I am out of ideas of how to find a decent internet plan. I went and bought a hot spot through my cell phone provider but not is going to get expensive and I think our package is $29.99 a month and the service we are getting I wouldn't pay much more than $10.99 to be honest.
My zip code is 49435 Marne Michigan. If anyone has any idea what my next step in locating a better provider or anything at all Im all ears and grateful for any help. I also hope you have a sense of humor and thankfully I do too because I am pissed but there has to be a fix. hell they are delivering beer to ice fishermen with drones for Pete's sake lol.
have a great evening! Thank you!
And kind regards
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