Review by mrg123 
UPDATED: 1.3 years ago
member for 5.8 years, 1332 visits, last login: 13 days ago
 Berthoud,Larimer,CO
 $39 per month
 "The only broadband available in the rural area that I live"
 "A little less reliable than a wired connection"
 "Overall, I'm satisfied and glad that I'm not stuck with dialup"
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We recently moved to to an area outside city limits where neither Quest nor Comcast offer Internet service. LPBroadband was the only ground-based broadband available. (LPBroadband is in the process of merging with another wireless ISP -- Mesa Networks. The two combined companies will be known post-merger as SkyBeam.)
Installation was quick, and everything seemed to work well right away. However, the installation was done in early spring while the trees around our house were still devoid of leaves. By early summer, we started having connection reliability problems. When this occurred, it seemed that the equipment would get hung up requiring a power cycle.
I had to call tech support at least 3 times to convince them that there was really a problem. At least one of the techs had that "customer is stupid" attitude, and seemed to be certain that the problem was my Linksys router. This was after a previous tech had already seen a temporary improvement by having me power-cycle their radio. Finally, the third phone support tech looked at the signal strength numbers and decided that I either needed my antenna re-aligned or a new radio. After a tech came out to do antenna re-alignment, things are back to normal with good reliability.
We use AT&T callvantage VOIP which worked flawlessly with Comcast before we moved. With Skybeam, we occasionally miss incoming calls; i.e., the phone never rings, caller ID doesn't show anything, and no voicemail indicator. However, call quality is great once connected. VOIP obviously didn't work during the aforementioned radio/signal strength issues, but since that has been resolved VOIP is back to almost-normal. I have the VOIP box behind my router; I suppose that the missed incoming call issue could be related to that.
Bandwidth is around 2 Mbps downstream and 500-600 kbps upstream. Measured bandwidth is pretty close to these numbers.
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Skybeam.net
