Review by glassman1 
Posted: 9.6 years ago
member for 9.6 years, 12 visits, last login: 5.3 years ago
 Richland,Benton,WA
 Business customer
 $69 per month (12 month contract)
 "Best bargain at time of contract. Inforative sales force."
 "Takes time to get it right. Lots of time. Too much time."
 "Use someone else until GTE gets their act together."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
|
Pre Sales:
5 stars, sales was courtious, prompt, and made shure I had
all the information I requested.
Install Cooridination:
0 stars, I had to coordinate it, and i've got all the phone
numbers it took. Managers and Executive Complaint Tickets
are wonderful things, too bad they work damn near bankers
hours.
Connection Reliability & Tech support:
3 stars, the help desk flunkies refuse to help me 'cause I
use linux. Asking for managers managed to get some techs that
knew something on site. Connection is fast, but has phenominal
latency, when it works. It took 6 months to get the connection
working w/o disruption. Even then it suffers from sickening
latency (150ms ping minimum) and packet loss (around 5% during
peak usage).
Mail, DNS, News etc:
1 star, These services are additional cost. Since I have a
linux box and my own domain these were un-nessesary. As such
I did not purchase them. Gaining proper reverse for my DNS
was a nightmare, and they _STILL_ haven't released reverse
authority for my IP, however they were nice enough to put
a correct reverse entry into their DNS files. I had to locate
a manager for this one, as with everything else. All the tech
support guys could do was send me to sales for a domain
transfer.
Value for money:
2 stars, you get less then you pay for. If you've got the time
to call managers and sit on hold, as well as have a fair
amount of technical knowledge to compensate for what the help
desk stone wallers don't know then it's not the worst choice.
The latency on the dsl, however, leaves alot to be desired; 3
to 4 times the latency I saw on my 28.8 modem. That's just
not impressive.
Misc essay:
As I said, Managers and Executive Complaint Tickets are
wonderful things. Since my initial 6 MONTH setup ordeal while
I was learning the GTE stonewall network and finding out how
to get things done i've proceeded 2 months further into the
contract without major incident. There was a service
disruption recently, but it didn't last long, and was during
non peak hours.
Overall i've been patient with GTE, and am more then happy
to chew up time on their 800 support numbers, after all, they
are the ones that wanted a 1 year contract. All I wanted was
access and a static IP. However, the next time my service
hiccups you can bet i'll be talking to some people in accounts
and looking up some numbers for executives.
Open pointers to GTE: Get an OC3 into eastern washington. DSL
is _NOT_ just a faster modem; It is broad band technology and
requires a larger upstream link. Deploy routers to the COs
that concentrate DSL; linking them to everett before you even
_START_ routing them means some UGLY latency. Train your help
desk to be able to work with people that are company techs so
that things can be done. Assign a primary person who is
responsible for seeing that the paperwork and internal
communication is taken care of, and just in case that person
can't handle it there should be a 2nd person who is assigned
to the account and kept up to speed on it. Dump this stupid
ticket process, it doesn't work.
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