Review by bod 
UPDATED: 51 days ago
member for 6.1 years, 355 visits, last login: 4 days ago
 San Jose,Santa Clara,CA
 $129 per month (12 month contract)
 "Speed!, symmetric transfer rates"
 "Poor support & communication with customers, having to make a fuss to get attention"
 "High symmetric speed, but poor support."
| Pre Sales Information:
Install process:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
|
Update 06/30/08: Still pretty stable, no outright outages since the last update. A handful of short periods when internet access was sluggish, but quite possibly not Etheric's fault. Ping times pretty stable during the day, some increases late at night/early morning. My link speed seems to be hovering around 10 Mbps down/8-9Mbps up, though I've seen individual tests as high as 14/12.
No improvement in customer support observed. I sent in a trouble ticket a couple of days ago about their speedtest web server giving 404 errors, and the email bounced! It listed several internal email addresses that couldn't be reached. So I sent it directly to the CEO, still no response (which is unusual). I'm guessing they have not hired a customer service manager yet.
________________
Update 03/16/08: Stability seems to have settled down, though minor occasional glitches remain. But my speed tests have settled out to be generally 20-30% lower than they were, which it's difficult to be happy about. Especially when they were hitting 40% higher for a few days. Which contributes to an impression that their network is not stable & reliable. Seems like they're always scrambling to fix something, never ahead of the game.
The CEO circulated an email to customers which laid out some of the corrective actions they'll be taking over the coming months. It includes hiring a customer service manager, which could help with their weakest aspect (support and communication with customers). Let's hope they find a rockstar.
I did renew for the next year, but not without thoroughly researching the competition first.
________________
Update 01/28/08: Things had been going swimmingly: great throughput, occasional but brief outage here and there, until mid-December. Things have been decidedly spotty since. I've had periods of poor throughput, high packet loss and multi-hour outages. I've just had my worst set ever at Etheric - a 5 hour, 2 hour and 10 hr outage on the same day.
I don't know the reason yet, which is an area Etheric could still improve - keeping their customers informed. It's probably PG&E's fault - the last major outage was (I had to call to discover that). The access points are at high elevations, and experience power outages more frequently in bad weather like we've had recently (high winds, heavy driving rain). It'd be great if PG&E would fix its frail network (heaven knows I'm paying my part to fund it) but it could be argued that Etheric could do more - e.g. backup supplies at the AP. Could be it comes down to cost - I suspect I'm on an access point with fewer subscribers.
Other problems have been interference affecting my link, and problems on the backhaul from the mountain ridge down to the Qwest data center.
I've been told the reason my upload numbers vary so much is that one of my neighbors on this AP is using a lot of bandwidth, and hasn't been capped yet.
On the other hand, Etheric hasn't been idle; a firmware update for the radio modems has dropped ping times from 2ms to 1ms (at the cost of 0.5% packet loss) and improved throughput.
One aspect I don't like about Etheric is having to be obnoxious about a problem to have it attended to - not something I enjoy doing. I'd rather report a problem, and have it fixed in a timely fashion, than have to make a stink. Past experiences have shown that not making a stink about it means it never gets attention (months can go by, literally). Support at Etheric continues to be their weakest area, sadly.
I usually pay annually, and am due for renewal about now. Which leaves me in a quandry. If I were running a business over this link, this would be hurting it, and I'd have no choice but to look elsewhere. But I'm not, and it's mostly an annoyance, except when I'm trying to use WebEx for a conf call!. It's also a more serious issue for my VoIP connectivity. Chances are things will return to their previous high levels; there's always that seed of doubt though, especially after extended periods of poorer-than-normal service. When it's working well (the vast majority of the time) it's difficult to match by other (reasonably-priced) means.
I'll post another update when things settle down.
________________
Update 11/18/06: It's a shame that it required complaining in a public forum, but it got the ball rolling at Etheric. I still think the normal support mechanisms need fixing badly, but Alex (the CEO) is serious about keeping his customers happy and fixing issues when he hears about them. Here's hoping that's infectious for the new support folks he's hired/hiring.
Alex first looked at the existing link, saw plenty of evidence of the issues, and spent some time trying to optimize my link (apparently the poorest on my access point). There was an small improvement, but not enough to think the issues were nailed.
Alex encouraged me to consider upgrading to the latest generation of equipment ('Gen3'), since the performance was better in just about every metric relative to the Gen1 equipment they installed for me three years ago. The catch? a few hundred dollars out-of-pocket. I can't say I leaped at the prospect, but after looking at the material, it did seem like I was getting something significantly better for the money.
A friendly and knowledgable installer came out to do the upgrade five days ago. It went smoothly. I have a much stronger signal than I did, and throughput has gone up about 4-5x over what I was seeing previously. DSLReports speed tests are regularly reporting speeds in the 10-11Mbps range in both directions, and I haven't yet seen a speed reported below 8 Mbps (even in light rain over a 9.3 mile link!). Ping times to the gateway are usually about 1.5 msec.
Etheric has restored my faith in them. I can't see any large ISP taking the time to make sure an existing customer is happy the way Etheric has done. Paying for an upgrade wasn't what I was looking to do, but they were pretty reasonable about pricing. I feel like I've gotten significantly better service, and at the same rates as I've been paying. So I can happy recommend them again.
________________
Update 10/28/06: Sorry to say, the service has eroded steadily, and much of what I wrote below is no longer true. I've had intermittent outages (>70% packet loss for ~15 mins) for almost three months now. The support email address is essentially a black hole. It took three days for them to open a ticket when I first reported a problem, and I've had zero response since the first couple of emails and attempt to fix.
My burst speed now averages 2-3 Mbps, a long way short of the speeds I saw originally. My service plan states 'bursts to 6Mbps' but I've not seen that in a long time.
I can't honestly recommend Etheric Networks as things stand. I'm actually sad to post this, as they've been great in the past, but I can't say I feel that way at the moment. I'm hoping this is temporary and things will improve again.
________________
I'm very glad I found Etheric Networks...
Prior to having service from Etheric, I was using two DSL lines (from different providers). Partly to try to get more bandwidth at reasonable cost, but mostly for some redundancy, as outages were not uncommon. While my time with Etheric has not been spotless, the few outages I've had have not lasted more than a few hours. To date, my outages have been caused by: firmware problems on the transceiver (fixed within a week, when the vendor released a fix), router failure (about 6 hours, I think), and a few short outages when configuration changes weren't quite right. That last one is a bit of a double-edged sword... The good folks at Etheric take the performance of their network seriously, and are often tweaking to make improvements - which is great, a point-to-point wireless network benefits greatly from that kind of attention. But sometimes the changes are not as transparent as one would like, and a little further tinkering is needed. But if I had to make a choice, I'd rather have a very fast network with rare, short hiccups, than one that's perpetually under-performing.
One problem that's occurred more than once has been minor problems with the local DNS servers. Haven't happened in a while though, so perhaps it's resolved.
While the monthly price isn't bargain-basement, it's great value. I have a committed rate equivalent to a T1, but usually see sustained throughputs in the 5-7 Mbps range (tested with DSLReports). I wish they'd run a local speed test server, as I suspect internet congestion is hurting the numbers!
I was trying to find reasonably-priced SDSL service before finding Etheric, and nothing came close. Startup costs are a little high, as you have to provide a security deposit on the transceiver that's installed, but I'd much rather do that than have it's cost rolled into the monthly payment.
The pre-sales experience was a mix. The first sales guy was hopeless, but he left shortly after. The second one was very much on-the-ball (though perhaps a little too driven for some), answered my questions promptly and kept the ball moving. The installers were great, took the time to put the transceiver in an unobtrusive location (which looks like a satellite dish, as I'm over 9 miles from the access point) and run the cabling out of sight.
These guys care about their network and their customers, and the support people know what they're talking about, on the rare occasions I need to call. I'm one happy customer.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Etheric Networks |
|
Etheric Networks
