Question about my neighbor(hood)

[wresnick]

I have Fusion at up to 20Mbps. The system doesn't show me any other options. If I key in my next door neighbor's address, it shows an additional option to get 50Mbps speed. The wall where my connection comes into the house faces the wall where my neighbor's connection goes into his house. The line coming from the street comes down between our two houses. That makes the distances about identical. The distance from the front of my neighbor's house to the back of the house is many times longer than the distance between our homes, meaning a connection in my neighbor's home could be a greater distance by far more than the distance between where the phone lines connect. All this makes it seem pretty arbitrary to me.

In my case, the jack being used is the closest possible one and has a Cat5e cable from the drop end, and my neighbor's house uses the crappy wire that the builder put in, so it would be impossible for my neighbor to get a better signal. Given that we are an identical distance from the CO, and that any measured loss at my neighbor's house would be the same as or worse than at my house, am I stuck with this arbitrary limit, or is there a way to have somebody go by what my FTTN modem shows?

[virtualmike]

It doesn't sound like you have FTTN. You should call Support (at 611) and describe this situation. Perhaps the AT&T database that describes distances to various addresses has an error with your address (or your neighbor's).

The 50 Mbps option likely is VDSL, which suggests the system believes he's within 8/10 of a mile from the telco central office that serves your neighborhood. Do you recall seeing any AT&T buildings within that distance?

[wresnick]

It turned out that the "error" was that out of the three pairs going into my home, only one could be provisioned because two were hooked up to bad lines going from a point under my sidewalk (where the neighbor's lines also hook up) to the CO. AT&T told me unofficially, since I am not their customer and they weren't even supposed to talk to me about it, that if I had the service, they would simply switch pairs to a working one. Since Sonic was the customer, they were entitled to the same level of service as any other customer. But Sonic was a dead end. AT&T couldn't put in a work order based on what I said. And Sonic kept telling me that there was nothing that they could do, because the problem is at AT&T's end. It was, but Sonic had the right to ask them to fix it. It was like talking to a brick wall.

I finally have AT&T's database corrected (not thanks to Sonic or official channels) so I was able to order the upgrade through Sonic. AT&T should show up, find a problem with the line quality, which they can fix by swapping out the connections, and they can go from there. The only question now is whether sticking with Sonic was a mistake, because they refuse to fix problems (not just this) or take responsibility for what's obviously at their end.

[wresnick]

Finally, after five years and countless calls, this is resolved and the upgrade was done. Sonic was wrong time and time again. The information that I had given them was correct in the first place. I was always within the proper distance. Two pairs going into my home were flagged and couldn't be provisioned due to line quality, but that was a repair issue. AT&T wouldn't take a repair request from me, since Sonic was their customer. Sonic wouldn't put in a repair request, even though they were entitled to, because AT&T had the pairs flagged as bad. I wasn't allowed to ask AT&T to unflag the pairs, but it finally got done, not by Sonic.

So I scheduled an upgrade in February, and here we are only seven premise visits and five months later, and the upgrade is done. Of course, it could have been done faster. I knew that the lines were bad and couldn't be provisioned. I told that to the AT&T tech, who didn't need to be there in the first place, so he thanked me, confirmed things, and called for the repair. The third person showed up after that, decided that my primary pair didn't measure as clean, and called in the fourth person. Then nothing. Somehow, the upgrade got canceled. Sonic doesn't know why, but they called AT&T to come out, and AT&T thought that they were there to do a repair. Since there was no open ticket for the upgrade, they had to leave. When they came back, they wanted to look at the jack in my home, which they couldn't get to, so they left. Finally, somebody came out, I explained that the jack was fine, and there was a note from a prior tech at the demarc point showing which pair to use.

Sonic could have called AT&T five years ago, said that the other pairs didn't measure cleanly, and they were entitled to the repair. Then an upgrade would have been simple with one visit. Even this time around, when they agreed that I was entitled to an upgrade, they could have told AT&T what I told AT&T, and they could have had the lines fixed first and then dispatched somebody for an upgrade.

In the meantime, Sonic has a record somewhere of all the support calls, and all the wrong information I was given, as well as nonsensical explanations.

So for anybody else in this situation, the best solution is probably to change ISPs.

[amayfield]

I'm sorry the upgrade took so long, that's definitely not the experience we wanted you to have. Regarding the qualification issues, back in 2018 when you expressed interest in upgrading our support representative double checked AT&T's own website which also reported that the 50Mb/s service wasn't available. We then emailed our contacts at AT&T to request they update their database to allow an upgrade to 50Mb/s as it seemed pretty clear that it should be available, they denied the request however. Unfortunately our agency with AT&T in these situations is pretty limited so submitting that request was as much as we could do to facilitate change. I'm glad to see that AT&T finally came around and updated their database though, and you were able to get upgraded. Thanks for sharing your experience, if you have any other questions or concerns please don't hesitate to reach out.