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 Review by djrobx 
Posted: 5 years ago
member for 9.5 years, 4613 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Valencia,Los Angeles,CA
 $129 per month (36 month contract)
 about 7 days
 "Goes where Verizon and Adelphia refuse to."
 "Horrible connectivity. What is an SLA for, anyway?"
 "This is no replacement for dedicated services."
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You may see my original review of the same service at the link below. SkyPipeline was bought by NextWeb, and instead of updating my old review, I felt it appropriate to create a new review under their new name, so others looking for reviews about the service can find my review.
»/dorateform/ISP/1901/42657
Our office in Oxnard, CA needed connectivity, and NextWeb/SkyPipeline was our only choice. We struck out with every other option, including IDSL. At first, NextWeb worked well, and the speeds were well above the cap. The reliability seemed acceptable. But over the months time would prove this to be an extraordinarily poor ISP.
Tech support answers quickly and are friendly, but are never able to solve the core issues that plague our connection, and they have never once followed up and asked us if we're satisfied with the resolution of a ticket. The connection suffers from short outages on a reasonably consistent basis. Tech support generally declares these issues to be problems with equipment that they are working on, but in the last 9 months we have never had truly reliable nor stable connectivity.
They have an SLA. But what good is it, really? They might give us back some measly percentage of our astronomical monthly bill? If the connection goes out for a full hour a day, 95% connectivity still sounds pretty good on paper. We'd be much better off paying Verizon $36.95 for some cheap DSL that's up most of the time. And that DSL would be a lot faster, too. $129 per month for unreliable 384k/384k service is truly pathetic, but given that we have absolutely no other choice, this is what we deal with. Their site advertises the service like it should be an acceptable replacement for mission critical T1 lines and above. Based on our experience, that's a laughable claim, and borders on being fraudulent.
Another customer in San Jose who reviewed them cited problems with broadcast packets originating from another customer. We too have experienced similar problems, with other customer's traffic saturating our connection to the point where it's unusable. I've emailed them logs of such activity, but they've gone totally unanswered.
After 3 or 4 months of regular calls to tech support, we've pretty much just learned to ignore the outages, and pray that it will come back in minutes instead of hours. With no alternatives and a 3 year contract, we are in a piss poor bargaining position. But for others looking at T1 alternatives, avoid this ISP at all costs. It's really that bad.
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Review by bashar424
Posted: 5.5 years ago
member for 6.4 years, 48 visits, last login: 4.4 years ago
Los Altos,Santa Clara,CA
$150 per month (12 month contract)
about 21 days
"Very good performance."
"Very expensive, frequent downtimes (but fixed quickly)"
"New technology with growing pains. But if you have no other choice..."
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I have been a Nextweb customer for the past 4 months, and have to say over all I am pleased with their service.
Nextweb tries to cater only to businesses, but thankfully they made an exception in my case. I live up in the hills, too far from local CO for DSL, and Comcast has yet to deploy their service in my area. A choice between wireless or POTS is an easy one to make.
The sales rep was professional, but not very accomodating. Nextweb pretty much has the marked cornered in the SF Bay Area, and he knew it, and was unwilling to deal or make the sale. Infact I orginally went with another, cheaper provider (Gatespeed) before realizing what a mistake I made.
Installation was difficult, and long, but I don't blame Nextweb for this. My location on a hillside made it very hard to get a clear LOS to their tower. Another, cheaper company tried before and failed. To Nextweb's credit, they stuck with it and made it work.
Nextweb is not cheap. At least not for a consumer who used to have DSL. $150 a month for 768kbps both up and down is scandalous, especially when you see speeds and prices Eastcost and Midwest wireless companies charge.
One thing I will say is that your money does buy professional service. Of the 5 wireless ISPs in my area, one was halting new subscriptions while they absorbed an influx of customers, another had gone out of business, another had been bought out (by Nextweb), and the only other company (Gatespeed) were disgustingly amaturish and sloppy. Unlike their competition, Nextweb is professional, and does everything it can to get your service working, and working properly instead of blowing you off once your installed.
The performance is fantastic. My speeds are slightly higher then what I purchased. Even the 10 - 13% network overhead is compensated for.
My only serious gripe besides the price, is frequent, (but short) downtimes. My service has some sort of disruption at least once every 14 days. Usually this takes the form of a 30 - 45min downtime. Just yesterday however, my connection slowed to a crawl (web pages would take 30min to load, or not even finish loading at all) for most of the day. By the next morning the issue was gone. Most of the time they are quickly fixed (yesterday was an exception) but really these shouldn't be happening so often.
Bottem line, Nextweb does have its problems, but if you can afford it and can put up with short downtimes semi frequently, I recommend this service. They have good tech support, and excellent performance. And if you're like me, and have no other choice, they definately beat dialup.
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 Review by L0GiX
UPDATED: 6 years ago
member for 9.4 years, 2508 visits, last login: 1.4 years ago
Santa Ana,Orange,CA
$300 per month (24 month contract)
about 1 days
"Excellent Pre-Sales, Install techs were fast and very knowledgeable"
"None"
"Great service for better price!"
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Ordered service on a Thursday. It was installed on the next day within two hours.
Pre-Sales was excellent! He gave me all the vital information I needed to know before hand so that the service would be installed correctly the first time. I already had out firewall ready for thier service. No Router needed onsite.
The installation techs were very proffessional as well as knowledgeable. They were able to answer any and all my questions. The installation was done with in 2 hours.
I have tested and logged latency as well as up time and speeds for the past two weeks. All have been totally stable with no issues.
Overall I would highly suggest this to anyone that wishes high speed with low costs. Now I'm thinking about putting this into my home and getting rid of DSL as well as phone service and only use my VoIP phone for voice.
UPDATE: 11/8/03 -
I have ordered and it has been installed at my home. 386/386 connection. Been running perfect. Installation about 2 hours without issue. Installers were curtious and polite. Answering all questions I asked. My monthly price is $150. Since I can not add another review under this login I though I'd update this one as well.
-L0GiX
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Review by ghamma2
Posted: 7.3 years ago
member for 7.3 years, 0 visits, last login: 7.3 years ago
San Jose,Santa Clara,CA
 Business customer
$695 per month (12 month contract)
about 14 days
"quick response, quick installation, quick online, no screwups"
"Good connection and speed, prompt response, easy changeover"
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NextWeb initiated the contact to convert us over from Innetix to their service. They offered improved connection performance and reliabilty at an attractive rate. Two workers visited us on scene to make sure the fixed wireless link could be installed (they could see two of the distribution sites). They were ready to do the changeover (1 week) before we were (2 weeks). We were at something slightly less than the promised T1 up and down, hoping to get full-rate service.
NextWeb took over from our former ISP, Innetix, by replacing our fixed wireless link (2.4 GHz) with a new one (5.8 GHz) and rerouting our domain. They changed our connection during the two-hour installation, and we only had to change DNS addresses on our systems (preserving our IP addresses). The new link increased slightly increased our download speed and more than quadrupled our upload rate.
They installed the wireless link equipment quickly and most conveniently, did the routing and changeover on scene, and did not remove the old gear until after the new connection was confirmed operational. The outside antenna (about 1-foot square) connects to an internal box (power and RJ45 WAN) via CAT-5. Their 30-minute estimate slid to about two hours on scene, but that was not a problem. The work was performed at the end of the day, so the next morning we were all switched over.
Our role was to change two addresses in our boundary router and replace the DNS addresses in our in-house systems. We have static IP addresses that we did not have to change.
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Covad Wireless
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