dslreports logo

Review by ryan83 See Profile

  • Location: Alpine, Utah, UT, USA
  • Cost: $45 per month
  • Install: about 30 days
Better than dial-up
Everything else - no 24/7 CS, oversubscribed towers,
It's the ISP of last resort
Pre Sales Information:
Install process:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

I've had Digis in 3 locations over the year. I've pulled it at each site as soon as I found an alternative.

A few words about Digis.

-- They use different definitions for speed than anyone else. Their so-called 7-megabit service is 5 megabits down, 2 megabits up. Nobody else measures speed this way. A T1, for example, is 1.5-megabit down/1.5 megabit up. Calling it a '3' megabit pipe would get you laughed at.

-- They oversubscribe their towers by incredibly wide margins. Worse, they use their consumer-facing towers for backhaul as well -- so Internet congestion a few towns over gets felt by you if your tower happens to be a link in the chain back to core infrastructure.

-- Their installers, while reasonably decent people, do not pay close attention to detail.

When I lived in Springville, my options were Digis, Comcast, or CL. Comcast was quite pricey. CL, on paper, didn't look very fast. So, I went with Digis. This house used to have Airswitch (a Springville ISP) that offered 10 megabit speeds, until Airswitch got killed off due to municipal ineptitude.

Digis speeds were highly variable. It'd be a full 4.5 megabits one day, then 2 megabits the next. Calling tech support was fruitless. Their solutions boiled down to rebooting the router, power cycling the equipment, and them saying they'll put a ticket in.

They changed their service plans at least 3 times over the years. At one point, they had daily throttling -- more than 2GB/day, and your speeds got cut to 128kbps down/32k up. Then, they switched over to a monthly-throttling style plan. Then they went to a no-throttle plan where overages were charged for excessive use. I suppose that wouldn't be bad, if there was any way to set up alerts to indicate when you're about to trigger an overage. There isn't.

A couple years ago, speeds were dropping and packets were dropping. Two techs came out at different times. They concluded that a tree was blocking the signal. I asked to cancel at that point, finally fed up with it.

I've switched to CenturyLink, which has been very stable for me. It took 7 months for me to get my refund check from Digis for my last 6 weeks' service while they dithered trying to find out why the signal was so poor.

Before I switched, when my credit card expired, I logged in to update it. I couldn't log in, so I called customer service. They said they had no records for that account, despite me having receipts in my inbox. They acquire so many WISPs here in Utah that they can't keep good track of their own customers.

About halfway through the above time, I turned my Springville location into a rental and moved to Alpine. Tragically, Digis was the only ISP available. No Comcast, no CenturyLink.

They hooked me up to a very oversubscribed tower. I logged ping times and transfer times. Averaged less than a megabit/second. One of the other joys in dealing with Digis is that:
A) Customer support is a business-hours only affair; and
B) Tech support and customer support don't talk to each other. Have an outage? First, you call tech support and reboot your router. Then, you can call customer support, wait on hold, and try to get a credit for it.

They fiddled with things for months until they finally got a new tower put up to relieve some of the congestion.

This whole time, I'm using a Cisco 3620 as my router. There are some of these things that have been running for a decade or longer without a reboot. I'd humor Digis when they asked me to reboot, but it was clear the problem wasn't on my end.

Right up until a lightning storm blew up my router. You see, when they hook the antenna up, tbey're supposed to ground it. There's an Ethernet cable going right from the antenna to their power-over-ethernet injector, and from there to a router. In any case, lightning hit the antenna, wasn't arrested, and blew up both the line card on my router and their PoE injector. No Internet. I went out and got another Cisco (upgraded to an 1800 series) and a lightning arrestor for it.

I was paying for a static IP address, which also got changed during one of their acquisitions and left me scrambling to sort it out until I chatted with tech support, who told me what they'd done and apologized for not informing me. "Not a lot of people use static IP's" was their excuse upon telling me they just create DHCP reservations for folks that use static IP's, and they'd changed mine.

If you have an alternative, take it. CL may not be as fast on paper, but it's a lot more stable. Comcast gets a lot of flak, but they know how to run highly-available infrastructure. Digis survives only because it's the ISP you use when there's nothing else available.


member for 9.8 years, 10 visits, last login: 8.9 years ago
updated 9.8 years ago