DSL Speed cut in Half

I have this same exact problem, and i'm fairly sure a very large portion of their DSL customers also have this problem.

I have a 3mbps plan currently and i get disconnected at least once every 15 minutes, it used to be a bit better a couple of years ago, but it steadily gets worse and worse. I've never once been connected for more than a full day. I've had multiple techs sent out here, all of them say the same thing; "There's a problem from the "box" end." This means it's on AT&T's side, and they've never once charged me for the visit, yet they've also never addressed the issue, i've never seen any improvement, and i've recently seen a significant reduction in average speeds.

With U-verse, it's only gotten worse, and i suspect this is being done on purpose so that people will be more inclined to upgrade. This is evident by the fact that it's actually possible to get the advertised speeds on occasion, so there's nothing actually wrong with the connection, even with the higher speed connections it's possible to get very good connection speeds to certain websites when using a VPN which masks your traffic. "Coincidentally", the websites that a VPN helps with are things like; Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, etc; these are websites that provide content and media which competes directly with the television services that AT&T "coincidentally" also provides for profit. Hmm, i wonder why those specific sites run so slowly on an AT&T internet service?

Their excuse is that: "There simply isn't enough 'internetz' to go around." Thus the slow-downs, they assume people are so stupid that they'll believe that bandwidth is some sort of finite resource. Well, it's not, it's not like water, or oil, or even electricity. The reason why it's so slow is for a few reasons, and all of which are entirely the fault of the service provider, and all of which could have been prevented. First is the fact that the infrastructure in this country has been left in the stone ages even though AT&T (and other major ISP's) receives tax incentives which are supposed to go towards improving the infrastructure; this was part of a little thing called the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Second, AT&T is supposed to pay for the capacity when a subscriber pays their monthly bill. There is absolutely no excuse for AT&T to not be able to provide the advertised connection speeds to 99.999% of their subscribers; AT&T is not the actual service provider, they're basically the carrier, they're supposed to pay the provider for access with part of the payment received from the individual subscriber, that payment is supposed to make sure that there is enough ports for each subscriber (customers; you and me) to get the connection that we're paying for, but it's become painfully clear that AT&T has not been paying for the access that the subscribers are paying them for, probably so that they can take home a larger profit. Being paid to do nothing is a great business model, apparently.

Third, the major websites that generate the most traffic on the internet, groups like; Google, Netflix, Hulu, etc. they all know that the ISP's are throttling connections to their websites, so what these groups have done is offered to help improve the speeds by paying for servers and to help pay for infrasctrucure improvements. Yet, AT&T (and other ISP's) have refused to actually take all of this free hardware and money being offered by major websites, with no reasons given. I'll give you the reason; they don't want the speeds to be improved to these sites, because they're in a competing business, that's a simple fact. I would be surprised if the copper infrastructure actually lasts another 10 years, the ISP's are already starting to abandon it, our barely functional connections are a sign of this, and the fact that fibre isn't offered everywhere shows that AT&T simply doesn't care.

This all inevitably leads to the hindrance of innovation, entrepreneurship, and even education of the general population. This is as bad as limiting access to schools or libraries, possibly even worse, since we're paying twofold for our internet, first from our taxes, and then from our monthly bill.

These are the reasons, but the worst thing about this is that there is no alternative or fix (at least nothing you or i can fix), all the major ISP's will give you the same if not worse.

Within the time it took me to type this post, i was disconnected six times.