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Review by cunnie 
Posted: 2.5 years ago
member for 4.5 years, 7 visits, last login: 234 days ago
 Mountain View,Santa Clara,CA
 Business customer
 $649 per month (24 month contract)
 about 8 days
 "Usually up."
 "Can wait 2 days for resolution of problems"
 "Don't bet your business on it!"
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Usually their service is pretty good, but when your connection goes down, their support is lackluster.
Our connection has been down for 36 hours. This is intolerable for a business. Oh, and we are a business customer: we pay $649/month for their "Super-T Dedicated 3Mbps" services. We signed a two-year contract.
I called them within minutes of it going down. Within ten minutes, the support person realized that he needed to dispatch a technician. It was at this point that their service fell apart. No technician was dispatched that evening. None the next day. Finally, this morning, a technician was dispatched.
I find it stunning that Nextweb/Covadwireless is trying to sell VOIP services: the company is clearly not set up to support business customers, and, judging by some of the other reviews, not residential customers either.
Fortunately, we had our AT&T Frame Relay 1.5Mbps backup system, and I was able to switch the bulk our our traffic over once it became clear that Nextweb would not be able to fix things in a timely manner, but what worries me is what if I didn't have a backup system?
I'd be more than happy to share my experience with any who are interested. My email is cunnie at aeluros (with the ubiquitous dot com at the end).
--Brian C.
p.s. And our accounts payable person says that their transition to covadwireless was very troublesome, and it took much work to straighten out the billing. This is from someone who rarely complaines.
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Review by bashar42
Posted: 2.5 years ago
member for 2.8 years, 20 visits, last login: 1.2 years ago
Los Altos,Santa Clara,CA
Contract price not specified.
"raw speed is good."
"poor performance (latency, packetloss), high price."
"go somewhere else"
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So I've been with Nextweb (now Covad Wireless) for 3 years now, purely out of lack of options (unless you call dial-up an option).
The reliability has always been spotty, with frequent, but short down times at least once a week. But what really makes Nextweb's service crap is the quality/health of the connection.
Sure I get just over the 768/768K speed I bought when doing "speed tests" and downloading from sites I frequent bare this out. The real problem is high latency and packet loss spikes.
I'm constantly plagued by dropped connections during VOIP calls, video conferencing, and online-gaming sessions. During these spikes my web pages won't load for 3-4min at a time and suddenly pop up again after mindlessly mashing the "try again" button in Firefox for the duration. These periods of dead-connection happen at least 2 or 3 times every hour.
I've been using the SmokingPing tool here at BroadbandReports.com to track the situation.
It shows the normal 15-25ms latency erratically spiking up to as high as 160ms during these spikes. It also shows packet loss of as high as 15-20% for stretches of 20minutes at a time.
I recently got fed up and called them up to try and resolve the problems. The first response I got was a lame "one of our routers went down last night, so that may have been the cause of your problems, it's back up now and I just ran some tests on your service and everything looks good." Too bad my problems have been going on for MONTHS. When I called him on this, and emailed him a link to my SmokingPing graphs, he then came at me with the "where are these servers located? Our network is clear, so if there are issues it must be with a router outside our network." Why am I paying these guys $215? For 20% packet loss? Does there service end as soon as my data leaves their exit router? If their routers are routing me through shitty 3rd party routers that is there responsibility! Rerout your tables, or do what ever else it is you pay your IT guys to do. I want a clean, clear, reliable connection, with the speeds I paid for. Anyway, after discussing with him some more, he took a look at "something" (his words) and said my node did look like it MAY be overloaded. He said he was going to have it restarted. 5min later my connection went down for 10min, when it came back, the troubles came back. Oh joy.
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 Review by ColorBASIC
Posted: 2.6 years ago
member for 2.9 years, 212 visits, last login: 2.3 years ago
Huntington Beach,Orange,CA
Business customer
$160 per month (24 month contract)
about 7 days
"None since COVAD took over"
"With COVAD takecover came horrible reliability, long hold times, expensive"
"Avoid at all costs, you're better off with dial up or other local WISP"
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Stuck with 768/128 Business DSL I was excited to get Nextweb's Office Connect plan even being 5X the price. The plan was to use it as our primary connection keeping DSL as a backup. All I can say is boy am I glad I kept the DSL. After originally being very pleased and seeing excellent reliability and great speed (3Mb/3Mb) since COVAD took over service has gone to crap.
Presales (2): Presales info online was limited to pretty pictures of models in business suits. You have to call to get any decent information. I guess it's because people fall over when they hear the price. In looking at the site now there is even less information that when it was Nextweb.
Install (3): Install was a bit silly. The installer arrived on time and did a decent job although I had to help. It wouldn't be so bad except in addition to having to help, the install fee was $300. For $300 I expected to sit back and just watch, not pull cable.
Connection reliability (1): The first year or so was great. Very low latency and decent reliability. Then the merger with COVAD happened and service quickly went to crap. Since the merger I've noticed they've cut the speeds of their plans and outages are CONSTANT and extremely frustrating. Usually the outages are just for a few annoying minutes (shy of their definition of chronic) but like today it's been hours. As I write this review we are yet again failed-over to our slow but trusty DSL.
Tech Support (1): Non-existent. Again during this outage I gave up being on hold after nearly an hour. This after being told by the automated system that the hold time would be "6-10 minutes". Even Verizon on-rot times aren't this bad on their worst day and their service is only $30/mo. And it wasn't like this before the merger. I was never waiting more than a minute or two in the pre-COVAD days. I guess COVAD's idea of customer service is not having any.
Services (1): Talk and a pretty website are great. They can talk talk talk about what they offer but unless I can get it reliability there is little point. That's not service. And worse everyone has a different phone number, doesn't share information and can't transfer you. You call billing but actually need customer service you can't be transferred, you have to hang up and start all over. Same with technical support. In addition, there is no account information sharing going on so if you are talking to Covad billing, they have zero information about your Nextweb account other than when you paid them last. They just refer you to the local office where there is just a cheap sounding answering machine. You can never get a LIVE person on the phone anymore. You ALWAYS have to wait for a callback which may be anywhere from hours to days.
Value (1): Again, there is little value in a service that is up and down constantly and you can't get anyone other than COVAD billing (who knows nothing but phone numbers of COVAD/Nextweb answering machines) on the phone.
Here in Orange County AVOID Nextweb/COVAD at all costs. And if you must try them avoid the contract. My next call to COVAD (certainly just to leave a message as you can you can never get these guys on the phone) would be to cancel if not for this punitive 2 year contract that I still have a few months to go on. But once expired I'm fleeing as COVAD wireless sucks serious ass.
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Review by josephguy200
Posted: 4.4 years ago
member for 4.4 years, 5 visits, last login: 4.4 years ago
Anaheim,Orange,CA
$400 per month (24 month contract)
about 1 days
"lost of speed"
"connection reliability"
"do your homework"
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Well just got the super T conntion which is 1.5upto 6megs install took over 4 hours after the install was done the conntion was well slow as slow as an 56k, so was i was told that some one would be out hear to fix something sure, the bottom line is right now i am under a 30 day trial so if everythings not working by next week i am just going to get ride of them there's no point in wasting my time.
P.S Nextweb never agin will i get a fixed wireless conntion.
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 Review by djrobx
Posted: 5 years ago
member for 9.5 years, 4625 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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Covad Wireless
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