Review by willgmcc 
Posted: 1.6 years ago
member for 7.1 years, 56 visits, last login: 1 year ago
 New York,New York,NY
 $77 per month (12 month contract)
 about 14 days
 Verizon
 "Good service, great people, reliable"
 "I wish every city had an option like these guys"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
|
I've had 3Mbps/368Kbps DSL service from bway for the past 8 months and have been quite happy with it. For a year before that, I'd suffered Time Warner's intermittent service, lackluster technical support and slow technician dispatch times. I chose bway simply because they're local and seemed more "human" than the mega-ISPs in the area. The only other local ISP I could find was New York Connect, but they didn't have as many speed options and didn't appear as progressive as bway did (bway does static IPs by default, explicitly lets you run servers on the connection, etc.)
Pre-sales was simple and straightforward. I'd basically already gathered all the information that I needed off their web site, so it was mostly just me making sure I understood everything correctly and then placing the order. The fellow on the phone was chatty and very pleasant. He was also quite able to field more technical questions and was very knowledgeable in that department.
Everything on bway's side of things went smoothly, and Covad had the line ready just 4 days later! Verizon, however, was not at all on the ball, because I didn't have a dial-tone, and my DSL modem (which I was just able to walk into the bway office and pick up in person) couldn't establish a connection. I rang Verizon, navigated their infuriating automatic voice assistance system and ultimately got them to dispatch a technician. I set a time and date with that horrible computerized voice and it confirmed. However, the technician never showed. I called Verizon again, finally got a human being, and they declared that I'd never made an appointment. I had to be pushy and finally got them to dispatch a tech the next day. The fellow, who appeared to be the only competent person at Verizon, showed up and said, surprised, "Oh, they never sent someone to switch on the line?" I told them no, that the sales person told me they could do it remotely, to which he smirked and politely told me they'd misinformed me. He went around the block to flip a switch (or something like that), came back and it worked. I plugged in my DSL modem and 30 seconds later I was online.
Since then, it's been smooth sailing. Speed has been steady, I've only noticed two disconnects and both were in the early hours of the morning and the modem was able to reconnect within 60 seconds both times. Today my download speed plummeted to 1/10th of what it should be, so after spending a few minutes ruling out my router and so on, I gave them a ring. I got a tech right away and he immediately started poking and prodding at my connection. As he was doing this he told me Covad had some trouble a couple hours prior but wanted to make sure my trouble wasn't something unrelated. After a few minutes of tests he concluded that things on my side appeared healthy and that he suspected Covad's earlier troubles as the cause. He advised me to give it a few hours and see if it improved, as he suspected Covad was still recovering, and to call them back if it didn't. He was right, because less than an hour later my line is back to normal. That's been the only real glitch so far, and as far as glitches go it was a pretty minor one, so I'm still happy.
I'll check back in a few months and update.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Bway.net |
|
Bway.net
