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.
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.
