The other day it was noted that AT&T was getting ready to raise prices on U-Verse broadband, TV and VoIP customers (see the fine print on this U-Verse pricing page). Judging from some leaked AT&T talking points posted to BroadbandReports.com forums, AT&T is getting ready to hit regular DSL customers with some price hikes as well.

According to the leaked memo, AT&T says they’re making some “modest price adjustments” to both U-Verse and DSL pricing soon, and that users should be notified by mail of the changes. AT&T is currently offering “DSL Xtreme 6.0″ (6 Mbps), “DSL Xtreme” (3 Mbps) and “DSL Ultra” (1.5 Mbps) tiers – for the same price. Users who sign up now are given any one of the tiers for $24.95 for twelve months, after which the pricing reverts to $42.95, $37.95, or $32.95, respectively. Keep in mind of course that AT&T continues to test low caps and high per gig overages in two markets and may or may not expand those ambitions in 2010 as well.

Update: AT&T reached out to us to note that there will be a few price reductions on their higher end U-Verse tiers, and they’ll be eliminating their slowest U-verse tier:

On the U-verse High Speed Internet side, there are some changes for new customers, starting with decreasing the price of our higher-speed packages – Max (up to 12 Mbps) and Max Plus (up to 18 Mbps) – by a month across all of our 22-states. The Express (up to 1.5 Mbps) service will no longer be offered to new U-verse customers as of Feb. 21.

AT&T tells us the changes “reflect the greater demand and interest we’re seeing for higher bandwidth packages among our U-verse customers.”

Too bad “greater demand” is met only with “greater prices” and not “greater service”.

Link to the original article…

A week ago we noted that a Mediacom e-mail upgrade promising to deliver “next generation” e-mail service wound up leaving some customers without e-mail for a week.

We’re now two weeks since the upgrade, and both residential and business users are still writing in to complain that they’re either without e-mail service, or they’re suffering through oddities like lost e-mail. An ongoing thread in the Mediacom forum has hit 55 pages, most of them filled with customers complaining about the broken upgrade.

“I have a friend who is missing around 1200 e-mails because of this,” writes in one user. “This is her business account and the missing e-mails contained crucial information,” he says. “She is about to lose a $30,000 account and may have to shut down her business permanently if she does lose the account and doesn’t get the information back by next week.”

“I am still without-mail service as of Tuesday, December 22,” says another user. “No one at Mediacom is helpful,” he writes. “On the 18th all of our accounts seemed to be working, now they are not,” writes yet another user. “The 18th is the last time we have been able to receive from these accounts.”

The upgrade appears to have given spammers an opportunity to hammer the system further, complicating the upgrade and repair process. Several customers complain that of the e-mail they do actually get, a chunk of it is new phishing attempts they hadn’t seen previously. Meanwhile, Mediacom appears to be waffling on user service credits – at least according to their official migration website and FAQ, which tells customers refunds may or may not happen after the company figures out what’s going on:

Will I receive credit for poor email performance? Once Mediacom has completed reinforcing security systems and improving email performance, we will evaluate the overall impact of the migration and take appropriate steps. Keep in mind that email service is only a portion of the High Speed Internet service that we offer. We will communicate the course of action in the near future.

On the positive side, Mediacom has several helpful techs in our forums (like uid://1696852) that are trying to assist out individual customers where possible. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be making Mediacom’s back end problem resolution go any faster.

Link to the original article…

Link to the original article…