AT&T Internet vs Spectrum Internet

Last Updated on April 15, 2023 by Dave Farquhar

I’ve had high speed Internet for about as long as anyone in my ZIP code–as soon as DSL was available, I signed up and paid through the nose for it. It took a while for fiber optics to become an option, but I switched once I did. I’ve been a Southwestern Bell/AT&T customer for a good 20 years. Over the years I weighed AT&T Internet vs Spectrum Internet. And for a while, I switched.

I switched to Spectrum in 2016, then back to AT&T in 2018. There are pros and cons to each of them, so I thought going through them might be helpful. Keep in mind Spectrum encompasses several legacy companies. Charter Communications started re-branding itself as Spectrum soon before it acquired Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Of the three, only Bright House Networks had a good reputation, but Bright House had low name recognition. Hence the use of the new name.

AT&T Internet vs Spectrum Internet: Speed

Spectrum advertises top speeds of 200 megabits in some areas, a gigabit in others, with the intent to roll gigabit out to its entire service area by the end of 2018. But as of the end of 2021, Spectrum gigabit is still only available in select areas. Coverage and availability are a big issue for both companies.

AT&T’s offering can vary widely. from old-school AT&T DSL that tops out at around 11 megabits, to the former AT&T U Verse offering that offers speed ranges from 3 to 25 megabits, and AT&T Fiber, which offers speeds at 5, 50, 300, and gigabit. AT&T has recently rebranded all of this as AT&T Internet, although the specifics can vary.

When I ran speed tests on both, I found that AT&T actual customer speeds are about 90-95 percent of its advertised speed most of the time. Charter Spectrum actual customer speeds are closer to 80 percent. When Charter offers 200 megabits in your area and AT&T tops out at 25, the difference doesn’t matter. When both companies are competing on even ground or close to it, AT&T delivers more Internet speed for your dollar.

Download vs upload speed

There’s one more important distinction with AT&T Fiber. Download speeds are the same as upload speed, or very close. That’s unlike earlier AT&T offerings and all of Charter’s offerings. With AT&T’s gigabit service, I can actually upload at speeds over 900 megabits. It’s amazing. If you’re working from home, the faster upload connection speed is important.

In my case, AT&T offers gigabit service in my neighborhood while Spectrum only offers its old 200 megabit service. The price is within $5, but the two don’t compare.

One caveat: There’s not a lot of point in shopping around if you end up buying a bigger, faster connection than you need. Here’s some advice on sizing your Internet connection. Both of them are likely to try to upsell you on connection speed, so it helps to go in with some idea how much you use.

Advantage: AT&T if Fiber is available. Otherwise, Spectrum.

AT&T vs Spectrum Internet: Data Caps

ISPs are immensely profitable, but they’re always looking for more. One way they look for more is by charging extra for certain ways of using the Internet, which is what net neutrality is all about. The other way is by charging extra for using it more, by imposing data caps.

AT&T has had data caps for years, but didn’t start enforcing them until 2016 and didn’t include a tool to measure your usage until after they started enforcing them, which is what drove me to talk to Spectrum in the first place.

AT&T’s data caps magically disappear if you buy TV service from them, or if you go with their gigabit tier. That should tell you what they’re trying to do–they don’t want you to be buying an Internet only plan and service from Netflix instead of buying TV service. They don’t want to sell Internet, they want to sell bundles.

In the past, the cap was 300 GB, which is easy to break. Today, it’s 1 TB. During the summer when the whole family is home and streaming video or music most of the day and I’m VPN’ed into work, we can use over 300 GB. It would take more work to bust that 1 TB cap. We’d have to stream a lot of 4K content, but I don’t think even that would do it.

Charter’s regulatory approval to merge with TWC prohibits data caps until May 2023. But they are giving every indication that unlimited Internet data will be a thing of the past just as soon as legally possible. In the meantime, it’s an advantage. But not the advantage it once was.

Advantage: Spectrum, until May 2023

AT&T vs Spectrum Internet: Throttling

Spectrum makes a big deal of saying they don’t throttle their Internet service. Maybe they don’t intentionally throttle. But in my experience, Zoom teleconferencing and streaming baseball with MLB.tv work so badly as to be nearly unusable, even when the Spectrum Internet Speed Test indicated everything was A-OK. I don’t know what it is about those two services and why Charter’s infrastructure doesn’t like them, but they work much better on AT&T, even lower-speed AT&T services.

Advantage: AT&T

AT&T vs Spectrum Internet: Running a server

Charter’s terms of service on its home Internet plan prohibit running a server on a home account. AT&T blocks port 25 but other than that, it doesn’t care what you do on their network. If you want to run any kind of server, you’ll have to get a business account from Spectrum, which is more expensive, though not prohibitively so. But AT&T is much more reliable, and if you’re running a server, reliability is pretty important.

Plus, if you can get AT&T Fiber, having symmetric upload/download streams helps a ton with running a server. Your server wants faster upload speeds, and I’ve gotten upload speeds of 940mbps or more.

Advantage: AT&T

Reliability

In theory, AT&T should be more reliable since U-Verse and Fiber cables are underground, where they are better protected from the elements. In practice, a bad installer can ruin any inherent advantage.

That said, I had U-Verse for years and if I had any outages, they were brief enough that I didn’t notice them. In my first month with Spectrum I had an outage several hours long due to a storm. Then, in the spring of 2017, long outages became a weekly occurrence, even in nice weather. Even when I’m not seeing service trucks in the area, I’ve had to get used to frequent short outages (a few seconds in length). If it happens while I’m reading the newspaper, it’s no big deal. If it happens while I’m VPN’ed into work, it might be. Spectrum Business’ speed may be business grade, but its reliability isn’t. In mid-2018, Spectrum had an outage that affected much of the St. Louis area for nearly 24 hours and had no answers for me when I called. I mentioned I could get gigabit service from AT&T, and Spectrum still wouldn’t tell me what they planned to do to avoid a repeat.

There were a lot of things about U-Verse that I was unhappy about, but it was reliable. Its reliability put Charter to shame. U-Verse had become obsolete, but its fiber offering puts AT&T back in the game.

If you can get fiber from AT&T, it’s no contest. AT&T wins the AT&T vs Specrum Internet reliability battle by a landslide. If the fastest you can get from AT&T is 25 megabits, and reliability is paramount, you may want to settle for the slower speed from AT&T, especially if you work from home. There’s that much of a difference.

I actually went with a dual setup, with the fastest service I could get from Spectrum and the cheapest from AT&T, to get around Spectrum’s atrocious reliability. But you shouldn’t have to do that. It was much cheaper to switch back.

Advantage: AT&T

AT&T vs Spectrum Internet: Customer Service

Internet Service Providers are legendary for providing terrible customer service. Time Warner Cable customers looked forward to the Charter merger because Time Warner Cable and Comcast provided the worst customer support in the country, not just the industry.

I had problems with AT&T customer support in the past, but it seems to have gotten better. Today they have a self-service support page and an app you can load on your phone that let you take care of a lot of things yourself. And the service is reliable enough that you won’t need support very often. And when the self-service page told me to call customer support, they were friendly and helpful.

Charter’s customer service is better than average. Their hold times are short and they are generally polite. They’re a long way from AT&T. Unfortunately, sometimes there’s nothing their customer service can do but apologize, and that’s pretty maddening. Depending on the problem, they may or may not have any idea what’s going on, and when you work from home and can’t work, that’s maddening.

When considering AT&T Internet vs Spectrum Internet, not needing customer service is usually preferable. And I needed AT&T customer service about once every three years or so in the past. I needed Spectrum customer service about once every three months, and toward the end, they were increasingly powerless to help me. There was a time when Spectrum had an edge here, but AT&T has closed that gap. I’ll give the edge to AT&T since I no longer dread using their customer support and I much less frequently need it.

Advantage: AT&T

AT&T vs Spectrum: Phone

AT&T has a cheaper VOIP plan than Charter, but if you actually ever use your phone, you can expect to run into overages on the $20/month service. The two companies’ $30/month plans are more or less equal. Charter pushes their home phone service hard because it’s immensely profitable. But the best source of good deals on landline-like phone service is an OBI 200 connected to Google Voice. You’ll save a fortune.

Advantage: Neither

AT&T vs Spectrum: TV

I don’t make a lot of use of cable TV packages. My favorite baseball team is out of market so to watch them, I have no choice but to stream baseball through MLB.tv. I also prefer watching Netflix rather than tethering myself to someone else’s schedule.

You have to buy a traditional TV package to get out of AT&T’s data cap, or get its gigabit service. If you were going to buy a TV package anyway, this gets your AT&T’s more reliable service. Which company offers the better package is up to you to figure out though, as the promotion price can vary from area to area and there’s a lot of personal preference involved. If you’re thinking of using AT&T’s $35 DirecTV Now service to try to get your data cap eliminated, sorry. It doesn’t count. I looked into that. But if you get gigabit plus DirecTV Now, the overall value is better than what you get from Spectrum.

Advantage: AT&T

AT&T vs Spectrum: Installation fees

Neither company charged me an installation fee in 2016 or 2018. I had to pay a pretty hefty installation fee for AT&T U Verse way back when, but that was a number of years ago. Be sure to ask about installation fees, but as long as Charter Spectrum keeps shedding customers and AT&T smells blood, installation fees will probably stay off the table for both.

Self-installation used to be a way to save some money with AT&T, but with Fiber, that isn’t realistic. In both cases now, the wi fi gateway needs some configuration and setup you can’t do yourself.

Also, with both, since professional installation isn’t optional and you may have to pay for it, ask what it entitles you to. If they’ll run Ethernet for you to a couple of rooms, that could be really helpful.

Cost

Both AT&T and Spectrum will try to bring you in with a lower introductory promotion price, then increase costs. Be sure to ask if autopay entitles you to a discount, or if they have a paperless billing discount. A paperless bill is more palatable than autopay, but every discount helps. Also ask if the cost includes the wireless gateway device or if that’s an extra fee, and if you can save by providing your own equipment. With AT&T that’s a no-go, but it may vary with Spectrum.

Some people switch between the two periodically in order to stay on the introductory rate. That can work, if the service speed and reliability are comparable in your area. In mine, they are not.

AT&T vs Spectrum: In conclusion

When both companies are bringing their A game, AT&T has clear advantages. AT&T’s gigabit service is faster than Spectrum’s gigabit service, and AT&T gives you that speed in both directions.

The problem is that neither company brings their A game, or even their B game, to all of their service areas. In mid-2018, for example, AT&T’s gigabit service is competing against Spectrum’s 200-megabit service. But I have friends whose choices are 200-megabit Spectrum vs 25-megabit AT&T. And some can only get sub-par Spectrum service, or sub-par AT&T service. Neither of them need customer satisfaction to make money hand over fist, and it shows.

When all things are more or less equal, AT&T beats Spectrum, and beats it rather handily. But AT&T’s 25 mbps service is a hard sell against Spectrum’s 200 mbps service. I’d consider it, but I’d second-guess myself a lot. And AT&T’s 25 mbps service is a no-go against Spectrum’s gigabit service. You’ll curse Spectrum during its outages, but you’ll resent slow speeds all the time.

If the speeds are even close, get AT&T because the AT&T fiber Internet speeds will be better than they sound and the reliability will be rock solid. Cable Internet, by contrast, tends to be worse than it sounds and less reliable. If AT&T doesn’t seem like it’s trying, go with Spectrum. But check again in six months. You might be glad you did.