Saturday, September 21, 2019

Has anyone had any experience with AT&T Business dedicated fiber service, specifically for rural locations?

My Mississippi business is located approximately 15 miles from the nearest reputable high speed ISPs like Comcast or AT&T Uverse. So for the past 18 or so years, we've used a satellite ISP (Hughes formerly, now Excede/Viasat) which means we've been forced to pay upwards of $600/mo for high data usage monthly periods and less-than-ideal speeds, ping, and reliability. FYI if we exceed 300gb data, we now get charged $50 for every 10gb more we use after capping.

Moving on to AT&T Business dedicated fiber... I was contacted by an AT&T rep claiming he could bring us a dedicated fiber connection to our office. AT&T would contract out the work as long as the installation costs less than $10,000; otherwise, they either wouldn't do it or would ask us to finance the install. For those that may not understand dedicated, AT&T claims speeds of say 50mbps down/up unwavering whereas a shared connection could be 35mbps down and 5mbps up on a good day. Continuing, AT&T is offering our rural location 50mbps down/up for $750/mo or 100mbps for $950/mo. Can even get up to a gbps but I didnt ask how much that would be out of fear of price shock. Because it's AT&T, this would also mean our phone lines, which we have two, a toll free and a fax line (yes we still use it), could be wrapped into this deal under that $750/mo plan. Where our phones cost us around $250 now. So far, it seems expensive since this would be $9,000/yr but still may be worth it. Unless you compare it to what you'd get in an urban market which makes this all sound like highway robbery.

Another unrelated to business perk is that this AT&T service has an option for running dark fiber to any homes on the property we own where the business is located. Those costs to install could be financed into the monthly bill. This is big news for those of us living out there as we could finally stream, download big files, and hopefully do some multiplayer gaming as well.

Back to my question... Has anyone had any experience with a rural dedicated fiber solution like this AT&T service?

TL;DR rural business seeks opinion on AT&T Business dedicated fiber



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