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Comment by kryogen1c | Hacker News Reader

The company i recently started managing it for previously went through some business and personnel changes and so doesnt have a good hold on their IT budget. Ive been discovering and recording bills from only at&t for days now. Highlights:

1300$/month for IT support

800% difference in per month rate vs 1 year contract rate

Different departments cant talk to each other and have separate accounts. I have att.com accounts and businesscenter.att.com accounts. Is AT&T BusinessCenter different than AT&T BusinessDirect? You fuckin tell me

Before i started, we were paying over $10k a month to only AT&T, right now we're <$7k and I'm not done. We have an account manager that i havent talked to. Clearly hes either incompetent or malicious, no desire to loop him in. Never before have i wanted to killdozer a company so badly. I have better things to do than review bills (although clearly not).

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I've faced similar issues.. it's almost impossible to do it directly on your own, unless you have enough business to get a real account representative.

This is why there are tons of third-party companies that are run by ex-employees that will manage all of your AT&T billing and accounts for you. There was a one-time fee, but it was more than made up for in what we saved by consolidating and normalizing all of our accounts through them.

It's annoying that I have to go through this extra hoop just to get reasonable service, but it's the only path I've discovered that doesn't make me want to tear my own eyeballs out at the end of the day.

I actually worked on the Business Center application. They are different systems, Business Center is supposed to be the future of Business Direct, which is our legacy product. The idea is that we on-board people onto Business Center, but since not all products and services are ported over, there is still a need for BD accounts.

Wow, can't change providers?

lol. You are from SoCal or Europe, right? Sorry, not trying to be an asshole. Those are (almost) the only two places where people on hackernews have more than 1.5 internet choices.

New Zealander here. The hopeless state owned telecom was sold off then forced to break up (into a line provider and a separate phone/ISP company). It has taken a very long time to come right, but NZ is now a great place to get internet and many good options are available from a range of companies. Gigabit fibre is here for a huge portion of residential customers. Connections of 2 and 4 gigabit are scheduled for early next year. I just tested a wall plate I mounted and am getting 920Mbps, for about US$80.

Even SoCal has plenty of areas with only a single broadband provider. :/

SF is finally starting to get competitive between gigabit options from Sonic, MonkeyBrains and WebPass. There's also of course Comcast, AT&T and Verizon.

That's the case for most of LA, as far as I know. Certainly true for the two apartments I had there. No gigabit, obviously.

Midwest here. I've got 100 Mbps cable for $70/month and can get 1 Gbps fiber for $100. Then there's the 0.5's like a couple DSL services.

Midwest US..., with locations in several states (and internationally)

While I only have 2 choices for my home, getting Business Fiber runs has been no problems, normally at least 3 companies if not more will provide them. Of the 5 companies that will provide us fiber at main office, only 2 of them also offer Residential Services (ATT and Comcast), the others are B2B only companies, and offer services at a faction of what ATT provides business services for, but considerably more than a Residential line, which is why there are only 2 choices for a home, there is not much money there

Northern suburbs of Indianapolis. I have two fiber providers, a cable provider, and fixed 5g available to my home. Hardly europe or SoCal.

Austin, TX. Known for being tech hub. I have two choices. Spectrum or AT&T. Both overpriced with mediocre but acceptable service. Known that we have it better than most of the USA. Your situation is an outlier and not the norm.

My wife and I mostly work at home and our kids are avid gamers so loss of internet access causes havoc, especially for the IT guy (me). I solved most of my problems by just getting the fastest service from Spectrum and a medium speed backup from AT&T.

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