Spectrum vs AT&T Uverse

As a long time bright house customer I have been satisfied with their service and have enjoyed (for the most part) their internet speeds. We have had some hiccups and brighthouse has been good about coming out multiple times to address the issues however, my interest lies in reliability as I often work from home and need consistency.

I recently discovered that a fiber box was installed directly in my front lawn with service from ATT. I’ve heard some good things about fiber and the 1Gbps (940Mbps) internet speed and the distance to the box to my house also seems appealing.

I currently leverage brighthouse (now spectrum) with their lighting internet 200 bundle with basic tv for 4 tvs. This delivered (on a good day) 200Mbps internet. Out of curiosity I went ahead and checked my speeds as I was writing this blog and I am currently only getting 113 down and 15 up. So as I’m used to with bright house, I’m paying for more than what I am getting. There is a good python script speed checker that you could install onto a raspberry pi and have it routinely check speeds for you on github. It also tweets out the speeds if they are lower than what you are paying for. I may try that once I finish this blog.

I have been paying about $199 a month for spectrum after all taxes and service fees are included. The actual cost of the internet is $107 which is what I am really concerned with. I don’t watch much TV in my free time, so paying another $100 for TV service on top of internet is a bit silly to me. So I thought it may be beneficial to post a spectrum vs at&t post and see if I can reduce or enhance my services.

At first glance going to the ATT site is a bit confusing as they have multiple internet, mobile solutions, and a mixture of directv and uverse tv offerings. It took me a bit to narrow down which services even being a bit tech savvy and somewhat educated on their latest offerings. I finally found what I needed by using a services locator tool where I plugged in my home address and it displayed what was available to me.

DirectTV seemed to be pushed as their go to TV solution, I have however used that service in the past and enjoyed the programming but the service did not fair well during our summer storms in Florida. I opted to go with the uverse programming. I also noticed that the digital uverse tv service also removed a data cap on the fiber internet. As I mentioned before the TV service isn’t a big deal to me, but removing the internet cap makes up for it.

I finally found the internet speeds, and it looks like 1Gbps was available as I was hoping it was. The cost by itself was only $90 ? Wow! If i compare spectrum vs att, we are looking at brighthouse charging $107 for 200Mbps and ATT charging $90 for 1000Mbps. Wow that’s 5 times more speed for $17 cheaper a month. That’s a savings of $204 a year, on just internet.

At this point I was pretty sold but was convinced that there were some hidden charges or fees I wasn’t seeing. I went ahead and started to checkout using their eCommerce page, found a TV and internet package for four TV’s and the monthly cost was only $130… they waived all of the activation fees, and the setup and installation fees.

So I’m now only paying $130 a month for the same or better (yet to be determined) TV service, and 5 times faster internet. That’s a savings of $828 a year! I get the services hooked up on Thursday and will do a deeper dive on what I like and don’t like, but at this point it appears to be a no brainer.

The only downside I noticed was that these prices were only for 24 months. After the 24 months the prices raise. I may at that point do another comparison of att vs spectrum again and see if I am in fact getting the better deal, but until then ATT wins my business for now.