I am on the 75 Mbps tier in Milwaukee area, which is now the fastest connection offered in the area by its two providers, AT&T and Time Warner Cable.
I just switched over from Time Warner's fastest speed tier now that AT&T has rolled out speeds that beat them. Time Warner made their situation worse by announcing a list of new markets in which they intend to upgrade to speed tiers faster than 50 Mbps, with my market conspicuously absent from that list. With this timetable given, it seems that Time Warner plans not to roll out a speed tier faster than 50 Mbps in my market until after 2016 unless they start bleeding customers to AT&T thanks to AT&T now surpassing them with this 75 Mbps tier.
So yeah, I didn't want to wait another two years for an upgrade from Time Warner after having been at 50 Mbps speeds for the last three years. That would have been five years of being stagnated with the same Internet speed!
AT&T U-verse speed test:
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Time Warner Cable speed test (the connection I just switched from):
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I had AT&T's 45 Mbps speed tier for a bit but decided to go with Time Warner instead the two were almost tied when AT&T's max speed offering was 45 Mbps.
You can see that because Time Warner Cable pads both their download and upload speeds by an extra 10%, there was really no point in going for the AT&T 45 Mbps tier over Time Warner's 50 Mbps tier, especially because AT&T's advertised upload speed of 6 Mbps on their 45 Mbps tier always seems to speed test in at the same speed as Time Warner's advertised upload speed of 5 Mbps on their 50 Mbps tier. Time Warner 50/5 and AT&T 45/6 always seem to speedtest in at ~55/5.7 and ~49/5.7 for me. So you got the same upload, and 6 extra Mbps of download from Time Warner, without the extra 10ms latency from U-verse's interleaving, and it was about the same price. So I saw no reason to be an AT&T subscriber until now.
Now with the 75 Mbps speeds from AT&T, there is some clear improvement to be had over Time Warner's 50 Mbps speed tier.
Here is my line stats for AT&T's 75 Mbps speed tier:
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As you can see my lines are capable of this with this 17a technology:
202874 (200 Mbps) down / 58028 (58 Mbps) up
That is why it saddens me that this is the maximum speed provision AT&T offers even with 17a:
90992 (90 Mbps) down / 8128 (8 Mbps) up
I could have handled those speeds just fine on 8a; from my brief time with the 45 Mbps speed tier I recalled my lines syncing at around 65 Mbps down for each pair and 12 Mbps up for each pair - with 8a I could've possibly done up to a 130 / 24 Mbps profile fine; now with 17a I could potentially do up to a 200 / 58 Mbps profile fine! Even when they roll out that rumored 100 / 10 Mbps speed tier in a year from now, they still won't be taking advantage of these new speeds offered by 17a at all because my lines could've easily handled a 100 / 10 speed offering on 8a.
It is nice that they seem to have padded the download speed by an extra 8 Mbps on the 75 tier as you can see from that speed test, the download typically comes in at 83 Mbps and not 75 Mbps on the AT&T 75 Mbps tier, but as usual AT&T continues to neglect the upload badly. I consistently speedtested at 49 Mbps / 5.7 Mbps when I had the 45 Mbps tier and now I see with the 75 tier the download continues to come in above advertised and the upload slightly less than advertised.
You can see that currently AT&T's fastest speed uses just 45% of my line's downstream possibilities, but even worse, the 75 Mbps speed tier from AT&T only uses about 14% of my line's upload potential. :(
If they provisioned properly and used about 45% of the line's upload potential to match the 45% they like to target for download potential, the 75 Mbps speed tier would have an upload speed of around 25 Mbps instead of a mere 8.
Can you imagine if AT&T rolled out a 150-200 Mbps down / 50 Mbps up speed tier for those of us close to VRADs? AT&T would actually be competitive with the cable companies and they wouldn't get trashed so much for not rolling out FTTH to everyone when they showed what DSL technology is really capable of. And once they introducing vectoring, which supposedly increases capabilities by another 50% or so? They could roll out a 250+ Mbps downstream speed tier over copper with 60+ Mbps upload speeds.
When Time Warner Cable rolls out Maxx to my market I will be swiftly leaving AT&T unless they have released new speeds by then that actually take advantage of my line's capabilities. This bump from 55 Mbps on Time Warner to 83 Mbps on AT&T is a nice little upgrade, but it feels incremental instead of revolutionary like it could be. AT&T's next rumored speed tier, 100 / 10, also feels like baby steps instead of a leap, and something that will easily be beaten by cable.
Time Warner Cable's Maxx speed tier's fastest speed is 300 / 20 Mbps, but I would take a connection from AT&T with half that download speed if they would just allow me to take advantage of my line's good upload possibilities. I would take a 150 Mbps / 50 Mbps speed tier (or something like that) over a Time Warner Cable 300 Mbps / 20 Mbps connection any day. I don't know why AT&T are so stingy on the upload on their speed tiers when that seems to be one area that they could really beat cable at, at least for a while anyways. If the best AT&T is doing by the time Maxx hits here is 75 / 8 or 100 / 10 then even though I'm annoyed by Time Warner right now for neglecting us, I just can't say no to 300 / 20.
AT&T announced the 18 Mbps tier in November 2008 and 24 Mbps in December 2009. Then it took them four years to get to 45 Mbps, announcing Power in August 2013, and then a little over a year to announce 75 Mbps in December 2014. Looking at this pattern they may announce a 100 Mbps speed tier at the end of this year, so who knows how long it will be before they come up with a speed tier that can actually use most of my line's 200 Mbps / 58 Mbps potential. To know what potential is sitting there and will be out of my reach for likely many years to come is disappointing.
So with that thorough examination of speeds out of the way, we finally come down to price:
The cheapest price AT&T offers this 75 Mbps speed tier is $65 a month if you bundle their cheapest phone service with it (just do it, for some stupid reason Internet + Phone ends up being $10 cheaper than Internet only; they want $75 a month this speed tier if you order it by itself. I don't even have a phone hooked up).
Meanwhile, Time Warner Cable wants the same $65 a month for their 50 Mbps speed tier.
Both services do not have bandwidth caps. AT&T claims to have a cap but it is well established that that has never been enforced, so it is just as unlimited as Time Warner. If AT&T actually started enforcing a cap then this would be a deal breaker and I would never ever subscribe to them again. AT&T could roll out GigaPower here but if they put a cap on it I'd be back to Time Warner's 50 Mbps service in a heartbeat. I cannot think of a faster way to lose me as a customer than actually enforcing a bandwidth cap.
So I would say if you live in a market where your cable company is neglecting you like Time Warner seems to be neglecting their Milwaukee market, switch on over to AT&T. At least they seem to still be upgrading, albeit slowly. I don't see the purpose of having a Time Warner connection in Milwaukee anymore as AT&T is now faster for the same price. Hopefully that motivates Time Warner to fix that and maybe they will accelerate their upgrade schedule and actually include my market on their list of planned Maxx upgrades for this year, but Time Warner seems to be too busy worrying about getting bought up by other companies to care about their competitor actually managing to beat them.
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