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Review by ieee1394 
UPDATED: 44 days ago
member for 8.2 years, 1168 visits, last login: 11 days ago
 Bainbridge Island,Kitsap,WA
 $999 per month (24 month contract)
 about 5 days
 "Works great when it works"
 "Definitely not a replacement for copper or fiber-based Ethernet"
 "Get this only if you can't get anything else"
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Connection reliability:
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DISCLAIMER: I'm a strong believer in wired connections (meaning copper, coax, or fiber). My personal belief and experience dictate that wireless is inherently flakey because of the line of site requirements, distance issues, etc. Case in point: If something gets weird with our Towerstream connection one of the first things I'm asked is: "Do you see any cranes in the way?" You see, downtown Seattle has been going through a mini construction boom and it is highly possible that a crane can swing between the AP and a subscriber's radio...thereby taking out your Internet connection entirely or at least introducing significant error. And then there's the part about things working great until they stick someone else on the same AP as you...and then you end up sharing radio time. Now way to get around that either because of those darn laws of physics! So as you read my comments/complaints below, keep in mind that I forever remain skeptical about this technology and expect it to fail; it's a wonder it work as well as it does when it works (which is most definitely most of the time, but only if it has been setup correctly).
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On our little island, located in the Puget Sound (right across from Seattle), there is no metro Ethernet, there is no fiber, there is no real business broadband connectivity available. The locals all seem to think that Comcast Business (a re-branded consumer offering) or Covad DSL (provided over Qwest's copper) are real business broadband. Sigh. To get any connectivity with symmetrical speeds around here your options are single or bonded T1's, or (shudder) SDSL. This is the kind of place where in 2009...I'm surprised no one's flogging IDSL (heh) or ISDN (double heh!).
Late in 2008 I came across an article about how TowerStream acquired SpeakEasy's wireless POP on the SpaceNeedle. "Hey," I sez to my self, "We have a straight, wide open, line of site to that there Needle! So I call TowerStream, since they also had a "special" running: 8Mps/8Mps for $999/mth. Then things started to go down hill. Sigh (again).
They like to say this is a bonded T1 replacement. They say they will assign you a netblock (just like they do in the real world when you contract for business connectivity). But they lie. Because all you will ever get is a bridged, and not a routed, connection. But they will tell you that "Yes, you will have full routing just like you do with your T1 from ATT!" But they lie, this time because their tech people don't understand what a Point-To-Point connection looks like, smells like, etc. But anyway...on we go. And this one's a doozie...
They no longer have an AP on the Needle. They have instead moved to several buildings in Seattle, most of which are blocked from my trees. "But we'll find someone out and they'll find a signal for you [embellishment: come hell or high water]." And they sent someone out.
They sent someone out who was 1) Afraid of heights; 2) Was expecting a flat roof and got a 4-story office building with a peaked roof; 3) Had no real equipment to do this other than his eyeballs and the signal strength monitoring built into the WiMax radio. Triple sigh.
So said guy just couldn't get a signal on the first day because line of sight was partially hidden behind trees. Being the PacNW these are, of course, 60 foot trees...tough to simply shoot over. I was ready to let it go at this point, not wanting to get stuck with some flakey connection. But no, the TowerStream people were determined!!
So they ordered a cherry picker and a tall ladder. And the guy came back and found a signal! But then it was a weak signal. So instead of the normal small antenna, they installed a 2 foot square antenna. And the connection we ended up with was about 10Mbps down and 12-14Mbps up. Rockin!
But that didn't last.
Before you knew it we started to suffer outages. Then our DSL line started acting up. So I decided to move VOIP onto the TowerStream connection. And that's when I noticed the (more or less) consistent packet loss that connection was suffering. And then before calling tech support I ran some speed tests (which I hadn't done in a while). And that's when I noticed that we were now getting 8-9Mbps down and 4-8Mbps up.
Now the tech guy goes: "Well, you are only subscribed to an 8/8 plan." To which I respond, "That's right. But if I was getting way better speeds before, then someone has either throttled my connection or you've expanded your subscription base on that tower I'm hitting. But he couldn't tell what has happened either way. Instead, they chose to go with scenario 3: there's something wrong with the equipment and we'll send someone out.
I have to point out, unfortunately, that we didn't get to that point until I insisted that packet loss was unacceptable on what is supposed to be a T1 replacement. I also pointed out that there's no way you could ever run VOIP or any streamed data across this connection when there's packet loss. Indeed, I have noticed this as my iTunes streams have started to drop out as this problem worsened.
So at the moment, I have this really expensive connection that I can only use for casual web surfing and file transfers because trying to use it for everything (meaning I can't currently consolidate both data and voice on the same connection because it...well, kinda sucks).
And now I'm waiting for the tech guy to show up. Which is an ordeal on its own, because they ask you what time, you tell them, and then the guy just shows up whenever despite the fact that you had to coordinate this with building maintenance.
Essentially, TowerStream is an overpriced consumer offering. It is in no way comparable to bonded T1s or any other similar technology its trying to replace. Don't be fooled. And I hope TowerStream can prove me wrong at some point.
UPDATE O3/28/2009 -- See comment below.
UPDATE 07/28/2009 -- Well, unfortunately the good times came to an abrupt end today at around 1:00pm. The office has been without phone or data since that time (I'm writing this at around midnight). Although Towerstream states they monitor up to the client's Demarc, I've never experienced this to be true. Unlike AT&T, Towerstream won't proactively call you if your circuit suddenly suffers performance problems (such as packet loss), even though they could monitor that. I opened a ticket at 2:00pm and have yet to receive an update (remember, this is midnight); in contrast, AT&T calls you on a regular basis (hourly) with updates unless they've isolated the problem and are waiting for an update at their end. My staff started leaving the office at around 3:00pm because no work could be done from that point on. And who knows when this will be functional again...like I said, still waiting for an update from Towerstream.
The funny thing is they are now openly offering a variety of services on their web site. I couldn't imagine subscribing to an OC3 level of service ($5K per month) with this crappy level of service when the thing stops working suddenly. OC3! Could you just imagine how many people that would impact? Comcast just ran fiber straight into the building a couple of weeks ago...so now I just might have an option if I decide to tear up the Towerstream contract.
Once again I must state that THIS IS NOT A BUSINESS LEVEL connection. It's a wayyy over priced consumer level offering and actually comes with the same level of repair turn around.
UPDATE 07/29/2009 -- And we're up again. Still no news from Towerstream customer support. I'm seeing our ping times all over the place though. This is kinda a telling me we're on a tower (gateway) that nos has other traffic on it as well...enough to delay ICMP responses (because of prioritization) at least. I can't see this as necessarily being a good thing for voice. Viewing my Speedtest.net history I can see that as recent as the 20 days ago we were still hitting just under 13Mbps...now we're down to 9Mbps.
UPDATE 07/31/2009 -- We've been up and stable since that last post. Looks like they have throttled speeds (which makes sense, otherwise there's no incentive for me to upgrade I guess) as they are capped at the speeds I'm subscribed to (8Mbps/8Mbps)...just not sure why they didn't do this before. With the network idle this morning (no one else in the office) ping times seemed to have settled to a more consistent niceness of between 3ms and 12ms. I can live with that. Apparently, they had to change frequencies on the radio. Which is a bit worrisome since there are only so many frequencies available and these aren't point to point connections (although that is what they use for their 1Gbps service). At the end of the day, once again I have to give them kudos for fixing this within 24 hrs...I just think the repair should have taken a lot less than that since it didn't involve a truck roll of any sort. Any better communication would be nice...although I do like that once a particular tech starts dealing with your ticket it seems that one tech sees it through to the bitter end.
UPDATE 09/25/2009 -- Ah and so here we are again. How many days has it been? Yes, we almost made it through 2 months without problems but ya didn't think that would last right??? This morning we are once again losing packets at the Seattle Internet Exchange (SIX). Last time this happened the net admins at my data center facility confirmed that Towerstream had indeed indicated they were having issues with their SIX connectivity. So I can only assume that this is once again the problem. And it just makes it painful to try and access any of our SaaS applications hosted on our co-located racks.
Once again I have opened a ticket. This time through their incredibly crappy online form with an incredibly tiny text form that allows you to only add a very short message (forget about really long ping or traceroute reports. Let's start the clock and see if anyone calls.
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