An Honest AT&T Internet Review, According to Customers

AT&T’s prices are middling in the fiber internet landscape, at least before other providers’ price hikes kick in. It runs more expensive than Google Fiber, the gold standard for fiber providers, by $10 to $75 depending on the plan.

But like most fiber options, next to cable internet providers, AT&T is much pricier. With AT&T fiber, $55 a month gets you 300Mbps download speeds. With a cable provider, $55 a month could get you as much as 800Mbps—at least for the first year, before price hikes kick in. AT&T customer Mike Hayden mentioned this disparity. “It’s kind of expensive,” says Hayden, who works in real estate in Oak Park, Illinois.

However, AT&T still gives you a solid deal, with savings factored in from the absence of data caps, contract cancellation fees, and automatic price hikes. To offset the cost, Hayden tried to negotiate a service discount, and, while he couldn’t get the monthly price down, he did get a $200 Visa gift card. “Which was cool,” he says. Longtime customer Jane Collins in the Detroit metro area says she’s getting a good deal too: “I don’t think they’ve raised my rate—like at all.”

AT&T Internet Air costs $5 less than T-Mobile 5G but more than a comparable Verizon 5G Home Internet plan, putting it right in the middle for 5G fixed wireless.

There are no two ways about it: AT&T customer service is light-years ahead of some of its competition. The American Consumer Satisfaction Survey, which asks respondents to rate home service experiences on a scale of 1 to 5, rates AT&T as the top fiber provider and second place non-fiber provider. Similarly, HighSpeedInternet.com rates it as the second-best in customer service.

Danny Flanagan of Eastlake, Ohio, says his experience with AT&T customer service was “fantastic!” A regional representative visited his home before installation and explained the internet service and other AT&T offerings. The installation started on time and took just two hours.

But being ahead of other ISPs doesn’t mean AT&T is perfect. For instance, Hayden hasn’t had the best experience with AT&T customer representatives. “There’s an awful lot of scripted ‘we care about you’ talk, but it takes a long time to get an actual human on the phone,” he says. “They do seem to fix issues quickly, though, so the automated phone system hell is a minor hurdle overall.”

AT&T has experienced multiple data breaches over the past few years, putting millions of customers’ personal information at risk in each case. And some news reports argue that the company hasn’t been terribly transparent in addressing them—for instance, spokespeople waited two weeks to release a statement about customer info that was found on the dark web in 2024. Ars Technica even reports this info was actually taken from AT&T in 2021, but that, at the time, the company denied the data was from its customers.

How long it took to get a real human on the phone: The automated phone tree worked really well for me. It listened to what I said, even when I told it I wanted to talk to a live agent. It took about nine minutes to get on the phone with said agent—which happens sometimes when you’re trying to reach a real person, even if it’s not fun. Thankfully, the automated assistant informed me of the wait time and gave me the option of receiving a call back so I wouldn’t have to stay on hold.

How the chat service is: The AT&T virtual assistant can give only pre-canned answers, not all of which hit the mark. I asked what kind of connection AT&T Air is, and it gave me some articles about AT&T Fiber. I could connect with a live agent through the chat only if I already had an AT&T account to sign into.

If you’re considering signing up for AT&T home internet, you’re onto something. AT&T offers two different internet types to meet various needs, and its fiber service is the obvious standout. But some of its plans can get costly, and we aren’t a big fan of the way it has handled its data breaches.