Review by petertait 
member for 3.8 years, 6 visits, last login: 1.5 years ago
updated 2.7 years ago
 Berkeley,Alameda,CA
 $49 per month about 1 days "Fast, small local company, frighteningly responsive" "Must have line of sight, and small company means service quality depends on individuals" "I'm SO happy...."
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If you have line of sight to one of the Unwired towers, and like dealing with a small local business, this is a great choice.
After almost 10 years of reliable COVAD DSL service, I started to have increasing line problems and decreasing speed. A visit from a COVAD tech uncovered issues with the line and resulted in the speed being reduced to 1Mb/s to get some stability, and lately it's down to about 750kb/s. I'm in the Berkeley Hills a long way from the CO, at least 12k feet, but 1.5M service was fine for years. My personal suspicion is that ATT/SBC is undermining 3rd party DSL service to cut these suppliers off.
Anyway, I needed a replacement and I didn't want to go to ATT or Comcast. Based on reviews on this site I contacted Unwired Ltd by completing the Check Availability form on www.unwiredltd.com. Within 24 hours, I had an email from a network engineer (Claire) with information on tower locations, plans, pricing etc. Over the next couple of days, Claire answered all of my service-related questions by email, sometimes within minutes.
When I finally selected a plan and sent her the paperwork, she offered installation the next day! Unwired was also able to schedule install within a one-hour window, and the installation tech arrived right on time. Installation took about two hours, and the initial tests showed I was getting 5.8Mb/s each way. That has since been throttled back to the 3Mb/s I am paying for, although it varies a little during the day. I haven't seen less than 2.5Mb/s down and 1.8Mb/s up on the DSLReports flash test. Latency is typically around 20mS.
It is funny and wonderful dealing with a small company. The bill arrived via email about 10 days after the install, and was actually from a real human being with a direct office number. If I have any billing issues, I can actually reach the right person directly, without going through a maze of phone choices.
Installation is expensive, especially if you choose to purchase the equipment, but the $49.95 monthly fee seems great for this speed.
So far, I'm a happy customer, and I love the idea of supporting a local business.
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