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 Review by odinthor 
UPDATED: 1.3 years ago
member for 5 years, 142 visits, last login: 61 days ago
 Conyers,Rockdale,GA
 $59 per month
 about 2 days
 BellSouth
 "NONE"
 "Where do I start?"
 "Don't bother"
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UPDATE-30 July 2008: SF decided to pull the DSL plug on ALL their Atlanta customers with NO warning on 29 July 2008. This action by them is the worst I have ever seen. They had no regard for the negative impact on my business and many others. In my opinion, they should be put in jail for doing this to several thousand customers and should be held financially responsible.
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Review by slick1ru23
Posted: 1.5 years ago
member for 6.4 years, 15 visits, last login: 55 days ago
Marietta,Cobb,GA
$49 per month (12 month contract)
AT&T
"Constant Speed WHEN connected"
"Outages, non-existant communications, parent company financial woos, High Cost"
"AVOID"
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I have had Speed Factory for 5+ years. They used to be a great company, but after being bought 2 years ago things seem to be heading south. The biggest example was a recent 4 day outage and the total lack of any communications from them or their parent company Next Phase during this crisis. As a resutl they have lost a significant number of their customers. Many of us trying to either cancel or get credit for this month, as promised by the parent company CEO have yet to find a way to communicate with the billing department. Emails are going unanswered. I have waited 2 days for a callback after leaving a message with an answering service. AVOID THEM AT ALL COST!
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Review by lyramisu
UPDATED: 1.6 years ago
member for 2.4 years, 22 visits, last login: 1 year ago
Atlanta,Dekalb,GA
$49 per month
AT&T
"Most of the time, I could get online and do what I wanted."
"Customer service abysmal. $350+ billing error. 72+ hour outage with no updates"
"Don't expect to get any kind of communication from the company about anything important."
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Things with Speed Factory started out OK. Connection issues were minimal. It got on my nerves that there was no real 24-hour support. Until recently, they also never changed their outgoing phone message in the event of a massive outage, so reporting such outages and finding out what was going on involved long waits on hold.
In late 2006, Speed Factory had a billing server crash. They lost all of their customers' billing information, and they did nothing whatsoever to inform anyone. I had been paying through automatic payment for my entire 3+ year history with them, and I had just had a salary change at work, so I didn't realize anything was amiss. (Yes, I know this whole incident could have been avoided had I just balanced my checkbook regularly. My financial issues affect only me. Speed Factory's complete inability to safeguard billing information affects all of their customers.)
In May 2007, Speed Factory sent me a bill for more than $300, with no explanation for its amount or how to make arrangements to pay it. When I called, a representative acted as though losing customers' information and taking 7 months to recover it was the most natural thing in the world. They said that I could pay the balance in installments and that they would change me to an invoice system rather than auto pay so that I could arrange for payment each month. I sent an e-mail explaining how frustrated I was with the situation and why I could not understand how they could fail to protect customers' billing information. Speed Factory did not acknowledge it in any way.
The next month, they automatically drafted the amount I had arranged to pay from my checking account without my permission. Then they sent me account past-due notices. I called again to ask was going on, and a particularly inarticulate, unhelpful representative explained that it must have been some kind of miscommunication. She also explained that they won't simply bill customers and allow you to pay by the due date -- you have to tell them in advance when you will be calling to pay your bill. (There's no option for online payment, so it has to be done by phone.)
I sent a second e-mail describing the situation again and expressing my disgust with their complete lack of fiduciary responsibility regarding customers' financial information. I also asked why customers trying to pay huge bills caused by Speed Factory's error were being penalized by not simply being allowed to pay their bills like normal people. SpeedFactory has neither acknowledged nor responded to that e-mail, either.
Don't go with Speed Factory. A company that can't back up its customers' billing information also can't protect that information from misuse.
Edit on July 4, 2007: Speed Factory is now charging me late fees for the past-due amount, in spite of me making arrangements to pay it, and in spite of the huge past-due balance being the result of their inability to bill customers appropriately.
Edit on July 10, 2007: I spoke to the new operations manager yesterday to settle the rest of the $200+ Speed Factory was billing me for, and to say that I would not be paying their late fee since the fee was only there because of their mistake. The operations manager agreed and told me that the person who had handled the huge database failure had been replaced, as had some of the reps I talked to. I'm still wary, though.
Update on April 15, 2008: Speed Factory had a massive service outage that lasted more than 72 hours beginning on Friday, April 11 at around 10:00 a.m. Anyone trying to call to figure out what was wrong was given an "All circuits are busy" message for that entire time. The Web site offered no insight into what was going on. People began to suspect that the company had gone bankrupt or otherwise closed its doors. An apology, but no explanation, finally came on Monday, April 14, after the network was restored.
This lack of communication, including the inability to even give callers a stock outgoing message explaining the situation, is unacceptable. This is especially true considering that they already had experience with equipment failure that dramatically affected customers. I have already been provisioned with a new provider and will be canceling my Speed Factory service as soon as I have confirmed that all my e-mail addresses have been switched to my new one. I do not recommend that anyone use Speed Factory as an ISP, ever.
Followup comments:  
NP WIRE
@comcast.net
| Post for SpeedFactory CLosed??? What happened to the Press Release from NP Wireless dated April 12th regarding closing its SF operations????
It was posted on website just before outage, now I can't find it on the web.
Are they closing or open?
What was the real outage???? FIre everyone?????? Noone knew how to redirect the equipment when Paetec took the IP line down??? | |
| | lyramisu
join:2007-06-30
Atlanta, GA
 ·Atlantic Nexus
·Speed Factory
| Re: Post for SpeedFactory CLosed??? The release wasn't about Speed Factory closing its doors. If you search Google for "speedfactory closed," you can still find the press release. But it's not about shutting down a business at all. It's a press release from April 12 2006, not April 12 2008, and it announces NextPhase Wireless closing their deal to acquire Speed Factory.
They haven't made any real information public about exactly what happened, but the prevailing theories involve massive hardware failure or massive failure to pay an upstream provider. Either way...massive failure.
If they plan to cease operations, there hasn't been a formal announcement saying so. But at the same time, based on traffic on this forum, it seems that the company has lost lots of loyal customers, which might make staying in business difficult, especially considering the most recent SEC filings indicating that NextPhase Wireless is running at a loss. | |
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Review by bmacleod
UPDATED: 1.6 years ago
member for 5.1 years, 12 visits, last login: 1 year ago
Decatur,Dekalb,GA
$54 per month (12 month contract)
about 4 days
BellSouth
"FORMERLY: static IP & servers, fast install, fast lookups"
"Lack of communication (services and support)"
"Out with you d*mned spot!"
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I ordered SpeedFactory's 1.5/256 service at $49.95 plus $5.00 for static IP (so I can have my servers). The ordering process was a bit cumbersome, with having to print off the PDF and then fax the order form. Despite that, the service was activate within 4 days, and to be honest, 2 business days since I ordered late on a Friday night, and had service running on Tuesday. It may have been active as early as Monday night (11pm), as the BellSouth line went dead then, but I didn't play with I already possessed a DSL router (Cayman 3220H), so no equipment needed to be sent, speeding up the process. My service is provided over PPPoE, which I wasn't as happy with, especially since my bandwidth is a little less than what I had with BellSouth using PPPoA. This is made up for by the quick response of their DNS servers, and news service feels pretty snappy to me.
2008-04-14
What can I say? No connectivity for days, and nary a word from them until today, and even then, a very useless message (more or less: we're working on it). I'm sorry, but if you don't feel it is worth communicating with your customers, then they should choose to communicate using you. Goodbye SF.
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Review by gatorman
UPDATED: 1.7 years ago
member for 1.8 years, 0 visits, last login: 1.8 years ago
Marietta,Cobb,GA
$42 per month
about 14 days
"None"
"Downtime"
"Good provider gone bad"
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Speedfactory has gone from being a goo provider to very bad and unreliable.
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Review by TrippinEx
Posted: 1.8 years ago
member for 1.8 years, 12 visits, last login: 324 days ago
Atlanta,Fulton,GA
$49 per month (12 month contract)
"No port filtering"
"Continuous connectivity issues"
"Stay away"
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Initially switched from Bellsouth.net (now AT&T) because it appeared that Bellsouth.net enabled some sort of port filtering. Went with Speedfactory at a friend's suggestion. Reliablity was good the first year, but reliability has go down hill for the last 6 months. Don't waste your time with them.
I've already signed up with a new ISP to try my luck elsewhere. Turns out I got a cheaper rate at the same time.
Just waiting to see if Speedfactory will screw up and continue charging me even though I no longer have service with them.
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Review by jameswade
UPDATED: 2.1 years ago
member for 7.9 years, 1854 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Atlanta,Fulton,GA
$59 per month (12 month contract)
about 4 days
BellSouth
"Used to be a good Internet service provider"
"Still charging me even though I've written mail to stop their service"
"Try BellSouth, they've improved while Speedfactory has gone downhill"
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Just received another bill from these guys - they don't pay attention. I notified them via mail well over a month ago that I was leaving them. I moved to another ISP weeks ago and they're still billing me!
Stay away from Speedfactory!
Well I've used these guys for several years, but they've been getting steadily worse in the last year:
Reliability - Our home and business lines (in three separate locations) intermittently stop working. These problems used to be with BellSouth (they provide the Internet acces to Speedfactory), but now there are server and NIC problems within Speedfactory.
Support - The only way that we've received any sort of decent support is that we know someone that knows someone that works at Speedfactory. IF we get an answer when we call we have to deal with rude and/or clueless people. Finally Speedfactory marked our account as "Knowledgeable Users", but that doesn't help if the "support" person cannot access our account, as was the case this morning when the "support" person insisted on walking us through resetting our DSL transceivers and PCs. (To no avail)
It's been an hour and a half now since we discovered all of this wasn't working and still don't have a call back from them.
The support page on their web site always gives you the same "temporary (sic) down" error message. It's been this way as long as I can remember.
I've had to use my cell phone to get on line, but that doesn't help the business locations...
BellSouth is now offering naked DSL, we're moving to them - we will double our bandwidth and save around $40/per month.
After dealing with Covad and different Covad-based ISPs the four days to connect is amazing. This maybe isn't Covad's fault, but the fact that Bellsouth seems to put up delays for other service providers over Bellsouth's lines.
These guys are based in the Atlanta area and provide Internet access for our small business. One of our people does a lot of business with Speedfactory so it's a little easier for us to call someone if regular support isn't handling things well enough.
I am getting what I expect for bit rates, almost 3 Mbit down and 384 up. I don't use any supplied services like email addresses, usenet, etc. I wanted the highest speed that I could get for VPN. This account came with one static IP. Two months were free if you used your own DSL transceiver, one month free if they sent you one.
I received a SpeedStream DSL transceiver with directions for connecting it, but no directions with the transceiver for configuring the PC side of things. I called and was told that the directions were emailed to me . I had to get a different connection to the Internet, bring up the email and download an attachment called 'WinXP_PPPoE' that told me how to set up a connection to my PC.
I had no intentions of doing this since I have a wireless router. This would have been very confusing for a novice, I have quite a bit of experience, but I still didn't know what kind of connection I was going to get. It was PPPoE. It would be better to have more information packed with the DSL transceiver.
I had asked for some information from Speedfactory a few months ago, but just got back canned responses. If I didn't have other methods of getting in touch with these guys I would have dropped them from consideration after that.
They have taken good care of us with our business account and I expect that my home service will be fine too, but I feel better knowing that I have other ways to get support issues taken care of than Speedfactoy's regular support. It's still early yet, maybe my experiences so far are not the norm.
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Review by jameswade
UPDATED: 2.2 years ago
member for 7.9 years, 1854 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Atlanta,Fulton,GA
$59 per month (12 month contract)
about 14 days
BellSouth
"Only down at least once a month"
"No naked DSL, support has become terrible"
"Try to find someone else"
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Well I've used these guys for several years, but they've been getting steadily worse in the last year:
Reliability - Our home and business lines (in three separate locations) intermittently stop working. These problems used to be with BellSouth (they provide the Internet access to Speedfactory), but now there are server and NIC problems within Speedfactory.
Support - The only way that we've received any sort of decent support is that we know someone that knows someone that works at Speedfactory. IF we get an answer when we call we have to deal with rude and/or clueless people. Finally Speedfactory marked our account as "Knowledgeable Users", but that doesn't help if the "support" person cannot access our account, as was the case this morning when the "support" person insisted on walking us through resetting our DSL transceivers and PCs. (To no avail)
It's been an hour and a half now since we discovered all of this wasn't working and still don't have a call back from them.
The support page on their web site always gives you the same "temporary (sic) down" error message. It's been this way as long as I can remember.
I've had to use my cell phone to get on line, but that doesn't help the business locations...
BellSouth is now offering naked DSL, we're moving to them - we will double our bandwidth and save around $40/per month.
Update 5/17/2007:
I came home today to find that I had no sync again - this happens about once every month or so. I cycled power, check my phone line going into the DSL transceiver, router login settings, etc.
I called support and was on hold for about 35 minutes and got dropped of the line. I called again and stayed on hold for around an hour and fifteen minutes!
While I was on hold I used my cell phone to hit the Internet and check Speedfactory's site for any outages. I didn't see any mention of outages so I tried the support link. It was down - just the way it has been every time I've tried before.
I sent an email to the support address in the 'contact us' link. It bounced!
Finally someone took me off hold and answered the phone. I got the usual "What lights are on?" questions - Power, USB, and ENET were on, DSL and ACT off, just like every other time that I've had to call about this. (It always gets fixed by a setting at the DSLAM)
I was asked to cycle the power, check that the phone line is plugged in - I'd already done that. Then he wanted me to plug into another power outlet. I explained that the power was on and other items on the power strip were fine and this was really hard to physically get to so I'd rather skip on to another step.
The support guy then asked me if I was refusing to follow the troubleshooting procedure, I explained my reasons for skipping this step and that I do this for a living and didn't think that there was a problem with the power. He persisted so I asked if he could just escalate the problem. He said that they don't have anyone to escalate to!
I asked him if there was someone else that could help me, he said that he was the only one there!!!
No wonder I was on hold over an hour and a half. The good thing is that my contract is up in fifteen days!
An older update in 2006:
It looks like Speedfactory has reversed the slide in reliability and service. We haven't experienced the intermittent service problems in months - these were mostly, if not completely BellSouth problems anyway...
About two years ago I ordered 3 Mbit down, 384 up. Installation went without a hitch and I never really had any problems.
About two years later I receive these speeds most of the time, but more and more often I lose service and it's more and more difficult to get Speedfactory on the phone to fix the problems.
To be fair it seems to be that most of Speedfactory's technical problems are a result of using BellSouth. The reason that I didn't go with BellSouth is because of the stress of dealing with their support people. I thought I'd pay Speedfactory a bit more so that they could deal with BellSouth. It's starting to look as though Speedfactory doesn't have much more clout than a regular customer.
Followup comments: phaqu
join:2005-05-26
Marietta, GA | Look around, Theres more than one dsl provider in Atlanta. And at least one I can guarantee that wont suck.
I remember trying to get dsl a few years ago, and called Speed Factory, but I dont remember why I didnt go with them. | |
| krayzie bone
join:2006-09-03
Marietta, GA | atnex? have you tried atlantic nexus? a lot of people have had good experiences with them, but i doubt it will be any cheaper then AT&T | |
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Review by DnEtDe6c
UPDATED: 2.2 years ago
member for 2.8 years, 10 visits, last login: 1.4 years ago
Athens,Clarke,GA
$35 per month (12 month contract)
about 7 days
BellSouth
"None really"
"Horrendous customer service, nonexistent tech support & unreliable connection"
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?"
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I ordered service from Speedfactory in June 2006 based on the generally good reviews they had received here. What I didn't know was that this was right about the time their service started to deteriorate.
For the first few months, there were intermittent outages (every two to three weeks) that lasted for a few hours. Their tech support always blamed the problem on Bell South lines. The thing is, my neighbors used Bell South DSL. One of them had an unsecured wireless access point. I would connect to it just long enough to check whether their service worked, and it invariably did. As you can see from other reviews, I was not the only person experiencing problems with Speedfactory during this time and getting the "blame Bell South" excuse.
If you happened to have one of these problems on a weekend, forget about it. There was nobody staffing the phones or returning calls. You had to cross your fingers and hope that somebody was checking messages and working on the problem.
Eventually the problems settled down (but never disappeared) so that Speedfactory became a sufficiently reliable, though far from perfect, ISP. Then the billing problems started that have been described by other reviewers. My bills were being paid automatically by a credit card, and I admit that I did not notice for a few months that I was no longer being billed.
I tried to access my account info at speedfactory.com. Their web site was literally unreachable VERY often. Once I got through, the message at their "Current Customers" support section said "This service is temporary [sic] unavailable." It still says this to this very day, nearly one year later.
The discussion boards at dslreports.com let me know that I was not alone with this billing problem. How Speedfactory continued for months without this revenue I'll never know. I do know that I was never — not once — notified about the problems they were having. It wasn't until a large bill showed up in February that I knew they had finally gotten things straightened out.
By now I had had enough of this incompetent company but was still locked into a one-year contract. The bills started showing up regularly (no longer being charged to my credit card, fortunately), but their web site was still unreachable on a regular basis. My account information could never be accessed online, as I mentioned above.
I didn't cancel my service promptly at the one-year mark because I knew I would be taking some vacation during that month and, let's face it, it takes an effort to switch. By now, as I mentioned earlier, the service and billing were mostly reliable.
The impetus I needed came when I returned home from vacation in early July to find my internet service not working. I called Speedfactory and was told that my service had been shut off because my account was past due.
Now I'll admit my payment was not made in time. Sometimes things slip through the cracks when you are busy getting ready to go away, and I made a mistake. But now they were going to play hardball with me -- when I was only one bill behind and they had recently gone for months without providing proper bills?
The representative I talked to was exceptionally rude. He expected that I would give him my bank account info in order to turn my service back on. I declined. I said I wanted to cancel my account immediately. He wouldn't permit me to cancel on the phone. Instead I had to write to the email address "contracts@speedfactory.net." I shortly took my laptop to a wireless access point and sent the email. I sent a check for the amount due, plus a late fee.
Story over? Not with Speedfactory. They sent me another bill in a few weeks for services they were no longer providing. I wrote back and said I was no longer a customer. They wrote back and said I had to contact, yes, "contracts@speedfactory.net." I wrote back and said I had already done this weeks ago.
End of story? I thought so, until I received ANOTHER notice a month later. Laughably, they said to "make payment arrangements as soon as possible to avoid service interruption. The system will suspend your account in five days if payment hasn't been received by then." They haven't even been my ISP for the last six weeks!
I am indebted to the reviewer "lyramisu" (see review below) who told the tale of having a bank account drafted by Speedfactory without permission. I had read the review before I was asked to provide my bank information, so this gave me a heads-up not to do the same.
Speedfactory is a regional ISP that should be providing stellar service with few complaints. If you still want to use them after reading the consistent stories being told here ... well, you have been warned.
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Review by Athens101
UPDATED: 2.4 years ago
member for 5.2 years, 11 visits, last login: 67 days ago
Athens,Clarke,GA
 Business customer
$79 per month (12 month contract)
about 5 days
BellSouth
"It's the only game in town"
"Less for MORE!"
"Good deal for those who host their own sites"
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Here in Athens Speed Factory is the best bang for you buck! I get 3.0+ down and 311K up all the time. I chose Speed Factory since they do allow you to run your own personal web server and email server. After 5 months the connection has not went down once! If you want to see my upload speed just surf around »Athens101.com .
UPDATE
Well after a few years of Speed Factory I am now paying 79.00 for the same 3.0/384 speed. My site Athens101 has went from 1k page views to 6-8k per day. I am working right now to move my site from home to a hosting service since the next option for more up link a whopping 768k will cost me 199.95 per month.
It would be nice if SF would up the speed along with upping their prices.
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