The grass does get greener on the other side.

iNICK20

I have had Comcast since 2000, and basically it was the main monopoly in my area. I lived in Joliet, IL until late 2024. It was the main competitor for Internet and AT&T finally decided it was Fiber time back in 2015 for Chicagoland. My small sub division got passed with no reason why. I had a tech tell me because no one on the main 3 or 4 streets really have it.

I mean who wants 100Mb/s down for $80? When Xfinity was 10x faster for cheaper or the same price.
Well the area was going to crap and I couldn’t afford the taxes to live there anymore. So I upped and moved to be near some Family in Terre Haute, IN. Popular is 100,000 less. So around 60k compared to 160k.
The funny part? Frontier and Joink is actively building out Fiber here. Even some homes that I considered out in the sticks have Fiber here.

I went from paying $100 for 1,200 down and 40 up. (They kept promising me the upload speed upgrade would happen within weeks back in July 2024, I’m not shocked they lied lmao.)

Now, I’m getting 7Gigs down/up for $110. I had an option of 5Gig speed for $10 less but it basically ended up the same price, because the 5Gigs speed doesn’t include the extra router I added on from them. Which is $10 extra but included with the 7Gig service. (Eero’s 7 Max).

bigcoda

Lol, the grass isn’t green in my neighborhood, over here in Stockton CA. Comcast unfortunately still has a monopoly in my neighborhood. At least they upgraded us to Mid-Split, so were not suck with the 35 Mbps upload. AT&T fiber is in some areas in Stockton CA, but no were to be found in my neighborhood.

kirkyg

I have had a very similar experience with AT&T and Comcast. While AT&T provides a very strong fiber implementation with a robust network backing it, their project management of infrastructure build out leaves alot to be desired. Little pockets of neighborhoods are left untouched in random areas of big metro areas. I live in a suburb of Houston, TX and during the pandemic at&t hit the inflection point of investment in my area. They installed fiber along the main road with adjoining sections of the same neighborhood and ran fiber all around. I can see a fiber hand access box 300 feet from my front door. Since 2021 nothing has happened in my section of the neighborhood.

It is amazing to me rural areas can be receiving fiber at a very high per passing cost and I live in a metroplex of nearly 8million people and I have one viable internet option - Comcast. I truly wish one of the alternative fiber companies would build out here so I didn’t have to choose at&t or Comcast, but I’m sure eventually AT&T will find it worthwhile to steal the market share back from Comcast and deploy here.

From Comcast perspective my internet was extremely challenging and I quickly learned to hate cable internet with a fully remote work from home job and very unstable internet. Since then comcast has had to take some steps to improve their network and the stability is much better. Speeds are decent and the mid split upgrade was great for uploads. However, there really is no comparison - cable internet scales up and down with traffic ALOT and fiber is well overprovisioned so you’ll consistently get max speeds. Thats the real issue here…one technology simply blows the other out of the water.