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Review by Paul in WA See Profile

  • Location: San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
  • Cost: $35 per month
  • Install: about 14 days
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Monkeybrains is a "WISP" or Wireless Internet Service Provider. They use small antennas mounted at each subscriber's residence to send and receive wireless signals through the air. When I first signed up my speeds were running on average 40 Mbps down and 30 up. Recently MB made some changes to the node that feeds my neighborhood and my speeds are now averaging about 65 Mbps both down and up. This is SO MUCH better than I was able to get with my previous DSL provider, which because of the limitations of that technology tops out at about 20 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up.

Rather than have higher monthly prices that include an equipment charge Monkeybrains requires each customer to pay for the receiver and dish upfront, which makes the install price a rather steep $250 but that includes the first month's service. After that though the service is only $35 a month. Period. This came as a pleasant surprise as my last provider's price of $39.95 ended up being $60 after all the taxes and fees got added. That doesn't happen with Monkeybrains. It's just $35 a month. Nice!

Somewhere on this site I came across a question from someone wanting to know if MB provides any "extras" like their current DSL provider whose customers, in addition to Internet access also receive a free (well except for those taxes & fees I talked about above) POTS line, call waiting and forwarding and the like. NO. After the installer is done all you will have is a little "power injector" about the size of a laptop power brick with an AC cord to provide power to the little rooftop dish and the Internet at the end of an ethernet cable that you can either plug into a computer or into a router. Monkeybrains is not going to set up your router for you, they are not going to troubleshoot your interior wiring, or anything else. They do have a few troubleshooting tips on their website. They pretty much can be summed up as "plug the ethernet cable from the power injector directly into a computer - unplug the power injector from the AC for a minute and plug it back in. If you still have the problem then get in touch with us, otherwise the problem is in your home network". Oh, they also point out that a very slow connection might be the result of going over their 500 GB monthly cap. For what it is worth it only took me a couple of minutes to change my home network from my existing DSL to the Monkeybrains connection.

In the 8 months that I have been a customer I have had to call for service only one time. When they were changing the neighborhood node to give us that big speed increase there was a misconfiguration and I lost service for a few minutes. They had me back up and running shortly after I called. EDIT: Ha, wouldn't you know. Within minutes of my posting this review my service went down. I rebooted the power injector by unplugging its power cord and then plugging it back in and the service came back online. Me, shaking my fist at the sky in my best Jon Stewart imitation "Damn you Murphy's law!"

I get my telephone service over my Monkeybrains connection by using an Obitalk VOIP adaptor in conjunction with Google Voice which, after the initial cost of the adaptor costs me only a very small amount a month to pay for 9-1-1 access. I highly recommend the Obitalk-Google Voice setup. I had tried using a MagicJack device prior to that, but the voice quality on the MagicJack was pretty bad. My friends all noticed the improvement when I switched to Obitalk.

I give Monkeybrains 5 stars. They provide me with kick ass speeds for $35 a month, have friendly and knowledgeable folks answering the phones and very importantly provide an alternative to the consumer hell that AT&T and Comcast can be. They come across as a little bit "counterculture", but hey, I like that about San Francisco.

member for 13.5 years, 1280 visits, last login: 239 days ago
updated 9.3 years ago