»next review in page
Review by aquifer 
Posted: 4.5 years ago
member for 6.3 years, 29 visits, last login: 4.1 years ago
 West Palm Beach,Palm Beach,FL
 $99 per month (12 month contract)
 about 30 days
 BellSouth
 "Service widely available; good tech support; reliable network"
 "Kind of pricey. Need to be more upfront about costs."
 "FDN came through when no one else would"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
|
I absolutely had to move up from dialup, but my neighborhood in West Palm Beach still doesn't have ADSL or SDSL thanks to BellSloth's inaction. And my attempts to order IDSL from Speakeasy and DSLi came to nothing because of various, apparently hard-to-explain technical difficulties. (At least Speakeasy got back to me in two days. With DSLi, I had to go through six months of scheduled, canceled, rescheduled, recanceled installation appointments before they finally admitted they couldn't do it. No, not even the DSLi rep on these forums could help.)
With FDN, the amazing thing was how painless it was to order the service. I called them, they installed it when they said they would, and bingo. When a problem arises (once every month or two there might be an outage, usually because of some problem on BellSouth's end), it's no problem to call FDN's technical support and speak to somebody in Florida. Yes, Florida -- not India. And it's always someone who knows about computers, the Internet, stuff like that, not just some jockey reading a script. All outages have been fixed by the next day; that may sound like a long time, but I usually discovered all of these problems when I came home at night, and FDN had to contact BellSouth to do the repairs.
So the service is great -- 128kpbs is at least better than dialup, and the speed has been solid both up and down. More power to them!
I do wish there were a way around the $99/month price, though I realize that IDSL is usually expensive. Unfortunately, their ADSL service (which wasn't originally available when I first ordered) is also $99/month unless you want to sign a three-year contract, which is simply insane. And they wanted to charge me an extra $200 or something in setup charges for ADSL even though I'm an existing customer. So I haven't upgraded, although I would if they would bring their prices down to something sensible.
FDN also wanted to charge me some ungodly price for a Netopia R3100 router, but those are available for $50 or less on eBay. Mine's worked fine for the past 18 months.
Two other nits: They don't list their prices on their web site, and their list of FAQs doesn't provide any information that a customer is likely to want to know. Other than that, definitely check them out, especially when everyone else says it can't be done.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of FDN (Florida Digital Network) |
 |
FDN (Florida Digital Network)
