After seeing another positive post I'd like to pile on since folks rarely take time out to say thanks for good service we normally just come here to complain about bad service:-).
Much like the other post, we debated about going to IPBB especially when I saw what looked like horror stories about the VOIP solution. In the end, the 25Mb/s down and 2Mb/s up was just too little for us so we took the plunge and I bought this APC UPS to help mitigate the power outage and recovery issue with the ATA:
https://www.apc.com/shop/us/en/products ... -CP12142LI
Note it can be had for around $90 on Amazon. Anyway, we ordered on July 2nd, got confirmation emails and it said likely a few weeks. Happy to report that they said they could come out as early as the 9th! Well, too bad I can't be home for that, darn. Rescheduled to the 13th! Cool.
I received the ATA on the 9th and as mentioned in the Voice forum I replicated the bug where it won't recover 'cause it boots faster than the Pace modem (note, Sonic provisions a temp number so the phone worked right away which was great for testing!).
On the 13th, Sonic called and asked if ATT could come early. "Certainly" I said. Frank arrived right around 10am. He was super pleasant, and asked me a bit about my current setup and when he realized I could easily set up the modem myself he handed me the Arris BGW210-700 and power cord and said I could go ahead and get it ready. All I really did was change the subnet from 192.168.1 to 192.168.42 to match what the Pace was handing out since I have an access point and it's statically set so this seemed easiest. It was.
I showed Frank the box on the side and he said "uh oh, that's really old wire and it likely won't be sufficient for the higher speed". He noted that 2 of the three cables looked to be original (~60 years since that the age of the house) and one was a bit newer (we think about 30 since we've been here 27). Anyway, he said that while some techs might try and make this work, he didn't even want to chance it and he wanted to get the newer shielded twisted pair cable. He went to his truck but didn't have enough so he jumped on the group text and found someone about 5 miles away that had it. He asked if that was OK and I said "yea, that'd be great, I'd much rather have the right copper cable".
He got back around 11 and then got to work. He replaced the cable from the pole in the neighbor's yard to my box and even took down the old three so it looked a lot cleaner when he was done. He then asked me to ID all the connection in there since I actually had three RJ11 connections 1 silver satin, 1 cat 5e and 1 cat 6 that we were going to use. I told him how I used the cat 6 for both data coming in and voice back to the box and he said that would be just fine and actually would help eliminate problems because he didn't want the connection he was putting in to branch off.
Once he got it all hooked up there he went to the box down the street and moved my connections over to the fiber. I had the Arris ready to go and plugged in so as soon as he got back we tested and we got around 78Mb/s down and 7.5Mb/s up! He then came in and made sure the modem updated and then he did some more tests on the line from the inside to give it a clean bill of health.
So like the other post to this forum, when you talk to ATT please tell them that Frank was fantastic! He was super engaged, did everything he could to make sure the installation was perfect and made sure he understood each detail of my setup to make sure it was all going to work out. He also left the wiring setup cleaner than when he found it!
After that, the folk from tech support forwarded my old number to the new number since you all have to wait for the official handoff from ATT.
Last night I got a text from support telling me to hook up the ATA. I replied that it's been hooked up for 2 days and that they should go ahead. They did and then asked me to power cycle it and then I was good to go. This morning, member tools caught up and I was able to set up the Mobile Connector on my phone. I even took a call from my "landline" on my cell phone on the front porch. That's a nice touch Sonic and I'm not 100% sure you do enough to advertise that little gem.
So a huge thanks to you all and to ATT. I'm happy with the results and even though ATT claims that I can get 100Mb/s down and 20Mb/s up using the same connection and modem thru them I did the price comparison and the base cost is cheaper but I'd have to add $30/month to make it fair and when I did that, ATT was a bit more. So, I'm happy to be paying Sonic knowing that you all don't mess with data rates or have caps and so that I can deal with your support folks rather than ATT's phone maze.
Count me as a happy upgraded Sonic customer.
Much like the other post, we debated about going to IPBB especially when I saw what looked like horror stories about the VOIP solution. In the end, the 25Mb/s down and 2Mb/s up was just too little for us so we took the plunge and I bought this APC UPS to help mitigate the power outage and recovery issue with the ATA:
https://www.apc.com/shop/us/en/products ... -CP12142LI
Note it can be had for around $90 on Amazon. Anyway, we ordered on July 2nd, got confirmation emails and it said likely a few weeks. Happy to report that they said they could come out as early as the 9th! Well, too bad I can't be home for that, darn. Rescheduled to the 13th! Cool.
I received the ATA on the 9th and as mentioned in the Voice forum I replicated the bug where it won't recover 'cause it boots faster than the Pace modem (note, Sonic provisions a temp number so the phone worked right away which was great for testing!).
On the 13th, Sonic called and asked if ATT could come early. "Certainly" I said. Frank arrived right around 10am. He was super pleasant, and asked me a bit about my current setup and when he realized I could easily set up the modem myself he handed me the Arris BGW210-700 and power cord and said I could go ahead and get it ready. All I really did was change the subnet from 192.168.1 to 192.168.42 to match what the Pace was handing out since I have an access point and it's statically set so this seemed easiest. It was.
I showed Frank the box on the side and he said "uh oh, that's really old wire and it likely won't be sufficient for the higher speed". He noted that 2 of the three cables looked to be original (~60 years since that the age of the house) and one was a bit newer (we think about 30 since we've been here 27). Anyway, he said that while some techs might try and make this work, he didn't even want to chance it and he wanted to get the newer shielded twisted pair cable. He went to his truck but didn't have enough so he jumped on the group text and found someone about 5 miles away that had it. He asked if that was OK and I said "yea, that'd be great, I'd much rather have the right copper cable".
He got back around 11 and then got to work. He replaced the cable from the pole in the neighbor's yard to my box and even took down the old three so it looked a lot cleaner when he was done. He then asked me to ID all the connection in there since I actually had three RJ11 connections 1 silver satin, 1 cat 5e and 1 cat 6 that we were going to use. I told him how I used the cat 6 for both data coming in and voice back to the box and he said that would be just fine and actually would help eliminate problems because he didn't want the connection he was putting in to branch off.
Once he got it all hooked up there he went to the box down the street and moved my connections over to the fiber. I had the Arris ready to go and plugged in so as soon as he got back we tested and we got around 78Mb/s down and 7.5Mb/s up! He then came in and made sure the modem updated and then he did some more tests on the line from the inside to give it a clean bill of health.
So like the other post to this forum, when you talk to ATT please tell them that Frank was fantastic! He was super engaged, did everything he could to make sure the installation was perfect and made sure he understood each detail of my setup to make sure it was all going to work out. He also left the wiring setup cleaner than when he found it!
After that, the folk from tech support forwarded my old number to the new number since you all have to wait for the official handoff from ATT.
Last night I got a text from support telling me to hook up the ATA. I replied that it's been hooked up for 2 days and that they should go ahead. They did and then asked me to power cycle it and then I was good to go. This morning, member tools caught up and I was able to set up the Mobile Connector on my phone. I even took a call from my "landline" on my cell phone on the front porch. That's a nice touch Sonic and I'm not 100% sure you do enough to advertise that little gem.
So a huge thanks to you all and to ATT. I'm happy with the results and even though ATT claims that I can get 100Mb/s down and 20Mb/s up using the same connection and modem thru them I did the price comparison and the base cost is cheaper but I'd have to add $30/month to make it fair and when I did that, ATT was a bit more. So, I'm happy to be paying Sonic knowing that you all don't mess with data rates or have caps and so that I can deal with your support folks rather than ATT's phone maze.
Count me as a happy upgraded Sonic customer.
