|
Home | Reviews | Speed Test | Tools | News | Forums | Info | About | Join |
Had Service for 9 years since 2003. Was paying for 1500 Kbps/768 Kbps DSL at 49.00 per month, 12-month contract. Actually receiving around 500 Kbps/300 Kbps. A ZyXEL Prestige 645 dsl modem was the equipment given with $99.00 rebate upon signup and 12 month subscription. Had them to repeatedly up my connection speed to no avail. With competition prices and enticements, it was time to change over. member for 21.5 years, 31 visits, last login: 12.7 years ago lodged 12.8 years ago
I have been a direct covad business dsl customer for the past 9 years. In all of that time, I only needed to call tech support perhaps 3 times, with one of those times being silly user error. Speeds were great and I never had an issue. As of last fall, the bill went up to $100/month for 3000/768 speeds as well as lots of problems.Uploads/downloads started to stall and my speeds based on speed tests are lower then previously obtained. Calls to tech support provide no resolution with the tech being totally indifferent to the issues. One tech will find a problem, then the next day I will receive an automated email saying that multiple attempts to contact me were unsuccessful with the ticket being closed. Of course, no actual call occurred. Calling back and reopening the ticket, tech then finds no problem and another automated email with the ticket being closed. I can not get resolution to my issues and have an almost unusable internet connection. I have started looking around at my other options at this point. In a nutshell: overpriced based on price comparison with other providers like launchnet or dslextreme uploads/downloads stalling. Fun watching your file transfer speeds bounce from full speed to stalled. Looks a lot like traffic shaping, but techs say no to that. tech support just wants you off the phone and will close tickets. It has happened three times now and I just gave up calling. Covad has no desire to take care of our treat right their long term customers. Covad was once a great isp, then they merged with megapath and the greatness is gone. member for 12.9 years, 4 visits, last login: 12.7 years ago lodged 12.9 years ago
03/22/2011 Update: Well, I had to update this. After repeated calls, Covad refused to budge on pricing. So I switched to Launchnet. I cancelled on 11/18/10 with Covad. 11/02/10 payment covered service through 12/02/10. So no more money was owed to them. They continued to keep charging the credit card. The first time in December, I called Covad, and waited for them to refund the $65. The second time in January, I let AmEx handle the dispute. Then they charged a third time in January and AmEx put a block on them. Now, they have sent me to collections and I have to deal with disputing this now. For a company that had such great customer service 7 years ago, they are horrible now. Original Review Below: Previously I had DSL through Prodigy DSL for over a year. The connection was great up until 10/16/2002. The line just stopped working. I troubleshooted and determined the problem to be upstream of my NID. I spent more than 15 hours on the phone before I finally cancelled my line. The problem, SBC acquired Prodigy and all Prodigy DSL customers are doomed to be migrated to SBC Yahoo DSL. Of course the migration has been delayed more than three months. SBC Yahoo DSL wouldn't handle my account, and Prodigy DSL couldn't handle my account yet. No one would put a trouble ticket in with Covad to fix my line. No point in waiting for them to do nothing. On 10/18/2002, in the evening, I cancelled with Prodigy DSL and placed an order with Covad. I figured if I had any problems with Covad, there was at least one less company involved to deal with as they are their own CLEC. On 10/19/2002, Covad provisioned my line and then their system automatically cancelled my order. That was a mixed blessing. When they provisioned the line, my modem synced right up and I could browse the internet. Their system cancelled my order because Prodigy did not issue a disconnect order to Covad, so Covad technically was not allowed to do anything with my line without Prodigy DSL's permission. To make that 10 day story short, I got a crash course in how the politics of DSL work, learned a million buzz words and finally got a real order # from Prodigy DSL when I called their billing department, sweet talked some woman into opening a three way conversation with their non-existent provisioning department, acquired as much identifying information about the two, explained my situation to them, they started to tell me that my line was disconnected on 10/18/2002, when I interupted them and explained that I was collecting evidence for my lawsuit against Prodigy DSL for violation of the Illinois Fair Business Practices Act. I got about 60 seconds into my BS speel when the provisioning guy gave me a Covad Order # for my disconnection. I hung up, called Covad, asked if the Order # was valid, they told me that it was entered about 5 minutes prior on their website. So, I lost my internet again (even though I wasn't supposed to have it in the first place) for about 24 hours, and then I was up again. Throughout the entire ordeal, Covad was extremely patient and helpful with me. A customer service rep kept me informed daily of Covad's efforts to get a response from Prodigy. Their tech support was very helpful in explaining to me who was responsible for what and basically gave me the correct language to use when I finally threatened Prodigy. I am thoroughly convinced based on the call backs I got from the customer service rep that she sincerely worked with her management to see if there was anything Covad could do for me. Well enough of my crying, now for the gritty details that most care about: Ordered: TeleSOHO - Self-Install - 1536/384 - Static IP comes with ZyXel Prestige 643 DSL router/line filters/and some wires Actual Speeds: 1200/200 (approximate average of about 15 tests) I believe that the speeds are due to line quality problems on Ameritechs part. The Good: setup is a snap (of course I already was setup). The static IP is assigned as if it were a dynamic IP, they just assign you the same IP address every time. This means you don't have to configure anything to make it work right the first time. The Zyxel Prestige 643 is the DSL modem and a DHCP NAT Router all in one. It also has diagnostic tools such as being able to measure your noise margins; attenuation; and relative capacity. (For those of you who always wonder if you are stuck in slow mode, the router can tell you what speed your line is setup for) The biggest plus for Vonage users, the Prestige 643 allows you to set IP Routing Policies (means you can assign preference to the Vonage data at the router level) Customer service/Tech Support always answered within 10 minutes. Believe I called enough times that I think this is normal. The longest hold time was with Billing. I had to call them because the $5 discount for using a direct payment option was not automatically applied to my account. Covad's turnaround for provisioning my line was less than 48 hours both times. I don't know how much that was affected by my line already having DSL once, but it still is a good time. The Bad: Sync problems. At least once a day, the router loses sync, but it reestablished connection immediately. Normally I wouldn't care, but I use Vonage and if the connection is lost for even an instant, the ATA 186 can take up to an hour to reconnect to Vonage's Servers. For normal internet browsing, you would never notice unless you looked at your connection logs. $5 monthly discount was not automatically applied to my account. If you get a business grade account, they give you a $5 monthly discount for electing a direct payment option instead being billed. (Residential grade plans don't have a choice). On the plus side though, when I called, they applied the credit immediately without any hassles. Of Mixed Opinion: They offer a promotion where the CPE is free with a mail-in rebate. I personally do not care for mail-in rebates, but I am not going to let $200 go either. I will update my review when I receive the rebate check to let everyone know how they are doing on that. ---------------- 12/15/2002 Well I receive the rebate in the mail yesterday. I guess they get a passing grade from me on the timeliness of the rebate. ----------------- 06/27/2003 Just to stay up to date. I have been using BBR's line monitoring and I rarely see an outage. Whenever there is one, it never lasts more than an hour or so in the middle of the night (IOW possibly planned maintenance). I use VoIP with this line just fine, although Vonage had to adjust the resync frequency to five minutes as apparently there are frequent "microoutages" that don't interfere with surfing the web, but cause my ATA-186 to lose sync. To sum everything up, I'm still happy with Covad, although I wish I could get a faster upload speed for the same price. member for 21.4 years, 1688 visits, last login: 7.3 years ago updated 12.9 years ago
Bottom Line says it all. In November 2010, I called to see if they would even budge on the price ($65 per month for 1.5 mbs DSL). They refused on several calls, so I gave them the boot. I canceled on 11/17/2010 and the monthly charges were still coming through on 01/21/2011. Three times I had to call Covad to get the charge reversed. Now I'm only dealing with the credit card. AMEX claims they have a block on them, so we will see what happens in February. member for 21.4 years, 1688 visits, last login: 7.3 years ago updated 13.1 years ago
Covad T1 Connection - Watsonville, CA The following information was provided to me: "Thank you for your recent order from Covad. We look forward to providing you with reliable, high quality Internet services. "Business T-1 1.5 $389 per month / 1 year / $369 2yrs / $359 3 yrs "Installation is free and averages 20 calendar days, while we provide a free router except 3.0, 4.5 and 6.0 Mbps T-1s over one year, where there is a rebate available. "All Covad T-1s include the following Service Level Agreements: 1) Installation within 30 days (averaging 20 or less) 2) 4 hour TTR (averaging 2 hours) 3) 99.99% Service Availability 4) 110 MS Delay 5) 99.9 Delivery" So, as you can see, THEY TALKED THE TALK. Installation took about a month and went as expected. Using speedtest. net and speakeasy.net, speeds were close to what was advertised but slightly slower (1.43-1.48 megabits/second). Obtained T1 line in order to obtain a reliable, high-upload speed connection, making using remote access software (teamviewer or logmein.com) feasible and responsive. The T1 line served this function for maybe a month. Then the problems started. I would be logged off of the remote access software and have to log back in repeatedly (a real productivity killer). The connection would not work well from approximately 3:45 to 5 pm (which happened to coincide with a part of the day I HAD to have a connection). I would call Covad, and they would tell me everything tested fine (but it didn't work fine). Repeated calls to support were made (some Covad support personnel admitted they saw problems while others refused to open trouble tickets). Probably two dozen support requests were made. The T1 connection did not work for approximately three days on one occasion and 24 hours on another occasion. We concluded we would have to leave Covad in the rear view mirror. We knew that Covad had not met the requirements of the service agreement (99.99% Service Availability and 99.9 Delivery). When the service has been down completely for at least 4-5 days in 9 months or so and down sporadically for significantly more time, THEY HAVE FAILED TO LIVE UP TO THEIR END OF THE CONTRACT. We replaced them with wireless ISP ETHERIC NETWORKS, which tests 9 to 16 megabits/second (we're paying half as much and getting 3 times the speed they promised). I called Covad to cancel the service and they want a $500 early termination fee which was spelled out in the contract even though THEY DID NOT FULFILL CONTRACTUAL TERMS (speed, reliability, availability). They refused to budge, and I asked them if we would have to take them to small claims court to avoid being billed an early termination penalty. They told me to go and take them to court if I had to. I later looked at the contract and saw that binding arbitration is your only recourse in case of dispute. This is a DEADBEAT company. They DIDN'T WALK THE WALK. member for 14 years, 2 visits, last login: 13.2 years ago updated 13.2 years ago
I've had Covad/Earthlink for about 10 years now. When I first got it, it was a reasonable deal. But now there are much better options, and I am ready to switch to cable. I pay $50/month for 2.5Mbps down, 320Kbps up (that's 0.3Mbps up). On the plus side, they have been reliable, with my service going down less than once a year for a few hours at a time. (Note that my phone service is from Qwest, but Covad uses their lines to provide the DSL service from my ISP Earthlink. It's a little complicated, but it works!) member for 22.7 years, 111 visits, last login: 13.6 years ago updated 13.9 years ago
Unfortunately, I'm stuck with this joke of an ISP, as I'm in a hotel and this is the only service I have available. The constant downstream packet loss rate is frequently 60%-100%!! I (try to) use Skype, but the poor connection quality causes frequent cutoffs during calls. Watching videos is a masochistic experience. They advertise 5Mbps download speed, but only rarely delivers anything close to that, and only for brief moments. How this company stays in business is beyond me. I'm going to strongly recommend that the hotel dump Covad and get a real ISP immediately. member for 14.1 years, 1 visits, last login: 14.1 years ago lodged 14.1 years ago
update: I was hoping I would get some more bandwidth at some point, remote dslam, something. Been how many years now? Good deal back in 2000 but $109 these days should be giving me more speed. Looking to change but I have static ip's with no domain associated. Meh . . . After my local isp was purchased by RCN I decided to start fresh. Started out with SDSL @ 768, it was great but they changed the package to ADSL with a 384 upload cap. Long story short, I upgraded to a dedicated loop (3Mb/768) and 10 static IP's. My router is 11K ft. from the CO so I was getting dumped into safe mode a few times a year. Got them to toggle the safe mode off so that doesn't happen anymore. I put the router, fw and switch on a ups in my wiring closet and my local switch and computers on other UPS' so now when the power goes out I can still use my connnection for a couple of hours. I wish they would give me back my SDSL like I signed up for originally. Pretty much rock solid for 5 years. I hope they're still around in light of current events. »/blog?cat=144 member for 17.2 years, 21 visits, last login: 12.9 years ago updated 14.2 years ago
I have stayed with Covad for more than 6 1/2 years. Their DSL service was very reliable during the first 5 years. Then something happened about 2 years ago, and I started experiencing increasing number of disruptions. Recently I have to at least reset the DSL modem twice almost every day. When I called Covad tech support, they told me there was a equipment change about 2 years ago. The connection problem I am having probably due to either my DSL modem not fully compatible with the new equipment or modem failing. I asked for a free modem replacement, but Covad refused even though it may be their device causing the problem. It seems Covad doesn't at all care about their existing customers. (Or, maybe they just want to get rid of old customers.) With Covad unwilling to resolve my connection problem, I am definitely looking around to switch. Now I just wish FiOS was avaliable in my area. -------------------------- As I mentioned in my own response to this review, finally my Covad DSL modem arrived on 1/22/2003. The whole transistion lasted 16 days since I placed the order. During the transition, I lost my DSL connection for about 5 days while waiting for Covad's DSL modem. Once the modem arrived, I simply plugged it into my phone jack, then properly configured the modem and my router. In no time I started surfing Internet again with faster speed I got from DirecTV. To be fair with Covad, I must say that the whole transition was mostly smooth except for not receiving the modem before they switched the wires. For now I am still taking a wait-and-see position. I will use line monitor on dslreports to see how stable the connection is. I have done the speed test several times. The results range from 1025~1247/326. One thing I don't like about Covad's TeleSoho service is that their static IP is not a reall static IP in a sense that it uses PPPoE for connection. It just alwyas got assigned to the same IP address. -------------------------- I was a DirecTV DSL customer. As every other DTV DSL users, I was scrambling to get a replacement. After much consideration and help of dslreports, I ordered Covad TeleSoho service on 1/6/2003, and was told that I may have only 1 or 2 days outage during the transition. On 1/18/2003 my connection was switched to Covad, and I got disconnected from Internet. The problem is that Covad did not send me their DSL modem ahead of time. Therefore, even though I am already receiving connection from them, I can't get onto Internet because I don't have their DSL device. For some reasons, Covad doesn't want to send out DSL modem until telco tells them the connection has been switched or installed. I would understand that if I were a first time DSL customer. They have to be sure the connection is possible before they send out the device. However, I ordered Covad service from their DirecTV user switching page on their site, they should be aware that I already have connection installed. They could make the whole transition smooth by sending out the DSL modem before telco switched the wires. Now I am told it may takes 5 to 7 days for the delivery. That means I am not going to have DSL for about a week. It really sucks. For other DirecTV users thinking about switching to Covad, my suggestion is to ask them to send you the DSL modem before the switching over takes place. member for 22.3 years, 108 visits, last login: 13.6 years ago updated 14.4 years ago
Just don't go there..... member for 17.5 years, 13 visits, last login: 14.8 years ago updated 14.8 years ago
|