My experiences is cable is more reliable, but AT&T is offering 300Mbps for a little less than Comcast's 100Mbps.

What terrible companies to deal with. I'm sure a lot of the quality and speed you might have will depend more on the local and regional supply and local demand. You might have access to metrics on speed test sites that offer some clue to the local users tests.

I have used both of those as ISPs in the past and have switched from both; I'm happy I don't use either one anymore (sonic.net).

Agreed. Internet service is a natural oligarchy with formidable barriers to entry.

That was my given. I just want to understand how well they're competing from a customer standpoint.

Sonic may have better service if not the best prices.

I am from SV but as a non-homeowner was pushed out. My remaining peers are millionaires or poorer than we were as kids.

Do you use Bodhi all in ram?

In my opinion. AT&T fibre is about the most reliable home internet that you can have. It is never down. Same as with their DSL. Their "home portal" is lacking. You don't "have" to use their device.

It uses a digital certificate to authenticate to AT&T. You can extract that certificate and use it on other hardware, or use a dumb switch with AT&T's device plugged in and your own, or use a smart switch with VLAN capability.

The device they give you works ok. It won't do true passthrough. It does double NAT. AT&T needed to protect their if [ customer -lt intelligent ]; do from themselves. To keep them from connecting things directly to the internet, no firewall, no nothing. And of course they are running windows.

The BGW210-700 has a separate ONT and Homeportal. The BGW310 is an all in one. So it poses a challenge to use another device.

https://manuals.plus/arris/arris-bgw...ual-admin-help
https://www.amazon.com/802-11a-Wirel.../dp/B08PCRYJPW

AT&T has a deal with amazon. The home portal sends browsing history to amazon to target you for advertising, I can tell you about that too. Not too hard to block.

Anyway, my experience is that AT&T fibre is 99.999% reliable. Gigabit up/down is $50 a month, or at least for some it is. Maybe you have to be a long time customer.

My area has neither AT&T nor Comcast. My sister had Comcast and disliked it, plus by default they set up her WiFi with a guest network and so she had all kinds of people lurking near her house til her husband heard a warning about it.

I've switched off between Verizon and Spectrum.

Four adults in our home, Spectrum gave us 300M and it was fine, streaming TV all over plus work from home, and one gamer.

After 1 year they added like $30 to the monthly price which was $40. So I swapped to Verizon (because foolish Spectrum who was "offering" a repeat promotion only to new customers wouldn't give it to me. Now they send me "come back!" ads forever).

Verizon is 100M, still no problems with speed, and it's $10 cheaper.

Well, ... we'll see what happens near Spring, if Verizon increase after one year.

THAT'S really the problem is that each company gives you service and then bumps the price up obnoxiously, while still offering the same promotion to new customers. So you switch and swap.

Sometimes one company cuts the other one's line back at the pole. Because you've had service before they think you can self activate. It doesn't work, and a tech has to show up, then discover they have to go get a cherry picker truck.

Blanket advice, get your own WiFi router and use email from somewhere not ISP hosted, and then your ISP is exchangeable. Sadly you end up overlapping one month as you switch over, but the WiFi password only changes when you decide to change it.

What?!?

AT&T ISP sends our browsing history to Amazon???

Is that how Facebook tracks all our browsing no matter which browser we use, which user we use, or how clean the config directory is?

I'll take the rest as a recommendation.

That happens in the UK too and not only for internet. Energy and insurance companies do it all the time. I believe it started when some clever dick invented price comparison websites. Like a lot of disastrous innovations, that one looked like a good idea at the time. The idea was that people would shop around and get the best deal. What actually happened of course was that companies had to offer unrealistically low prices to new customers get recommended by the comparison websites and they funded that by overcharging their existing customers. So everyone now has to change suppliers every year to avoid getting robbed blind.