So, recently I got a letter in the mail from AT&T telling me that they're finally rolling out AT&T U-Verse out to my area. I live in the southeast, and in a respectably rural area. I'm outside of my local city limits, but I have electricity and landline ran out to my house.
I saw this letter and thought "Oh hey, maybe AT&T is upgrading their infrastructure!". Wrong. Well, regardless I went ahead and talked to some lady at AT&T about the upgrade and they sent me a modem/wireless AP combo unit for the upgrade, and that was that.
Box arrives in the mail, and then I realized what was going on. I'm not actually getting any kind of infrastructure upgrade at all. It's just some new name for AT&T internet service that is still being delivered over a phone line to me. In addition, I didn't get any kind of speed improvement at all. Apparently there's a 12 mbps package I can upgrade to (I currently run 6 mbps down/.5 up), but I said "no" after I realized what the prices were.
I paid $57 for 6 down and .5 up. Point five folks. Not even 1 mbps down. With this new U-Verse upgrade, I'm now paying $52 for the same speed. This is stupidly ridiculous. Just like many other parts of the United States, I'm essentially stuck with this. I can continue to deal with this AT&T nonsense, or go satellite, which would arguably make things worse.
This is pretty much the only bad thing I can say when it comes to living in a rural area. You're just going to have to put up with shitty internet speeds, and you'll get new technology probably 20-50 years after the crap comes out.
Shame on me, though, for thinking that AT&T would actually take initiative and try to advance technology further. Whether their U-Verse service states that part or all of their network could be fiber optics, it's definitely not fiber where I think it counts the most. I don't care how much fiber you have, but it won't mean anything if what delivers bandwidth to a house is still copper lines.
I mean, come on. Even running coax out to my house would be tens of times better than using a phone line.
</Rant>
