It was unfortunate to learn that BeIN Sports was dropped by Xfinity, and I had to figure out a workaround. No other cable or dish operator provided the channel, and I did not want to install a dish on my roof either. I had to reuse the existing cabling at home. The only option was streaming (any service that provided BeIN Sports Connect).
I needed a service with no data transfer cap, and I had two options. AT&T Fiber 1000, and Xfinity Gigabit service.
The table below shows the pricing, contract and speed information.
Provider | Price | Rebate | Speed (Mbps) Down/Up | Contract | ETF*** |
AT&T | $90 | $150** | 1000/1000 | 1-year | $180 |
Xfinity | $82* | None | 1000/35 | 2-years | $240 |
* Included the price of leased equipment
** Engaged on a chat session and got offered an additional $100
*** Reduced for every month of service
The information depicted is for South Florida, Broward county. It could vary be region.
It was an easy pick for me. AT&T offers a symmetrical service, with uploads maxing out at 1000 Mbps. And I am on the hook for just 1 year.
The AT&T technician ran fiber cable from the street all the way to my outside wall, installed a fiber to Ethernet box (which is located inside the house), and reused the phone cable that already ran to a junction box I had inside the house already (the phone cable was Cat 5e Ethernet).
Fortunately, my house is already pre-wired with Cat 5e network cables, and had already in place 2 wired access points with 802.11ac Wi-Fi. I swapped out my old Xfinity router with the new one AT&T provided, and plugged in 4 Ethernet cables to the network ports provided. The router serves also as DHCP server and as a 802.11ac access point. The network ports feed to the 2 additional access points (which also have 4 gigabit network ports, each), as well as the security camera system and my son’s gaming computer.
I changed the router internal IP address, and reconfigured the Wi-Fi SSIDs, to make the migration transparent. All 38 or so devices continued to work without any issues.
I was skeptical in the beginning, as I was not sure if the Cat 5e cables would sustain gigabit connectivity. To my surprise, they do, and it is consistent.
![](https://i0.wp.com/ozamora.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/image-1.png?resize=412%2C389&ssl=1)
The 802.11 ac access points provide speeds that vary between 180 to 480 Mbps. They are just fine for streaming and laptop/smartphone connectivity. All heavy duty processing are performed at hard wired equipment, including my main desktop computer.
I am very happy with the service thus far, and having a symmetrical service is fantastic. The very first day I was able to upload 1 TB of video files to my Google Drive. Previously it would have taken me several days (capped at 10 Mbps upload speeds before).
If you are tempted to get AT&T fiber 1000, they are providing 2 additional access points that create a mesh network, for free. 802.11ac + 802.11n bands.
I do believe that streaming is the future of TV service, and cable has its days counted.
Happy streaming.