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Review by RayW See Profile

  • Location: Layton, Davis, UT, USA
  • Cost: $50 per month (6 month contract)
  • Telco party Qwest
They work, They PPP, They always on, The support hold music is good.
ping count, download speed
Middle of the road service,average price.
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

I reviewed my connection hassles with QWEST in another review under QWEST.

I have been with Burgoyne (a Utah computer store/internet company) for almost two years as a dialup customer. The dialup fees for almost all you can eat were $18.95/mo/6 mo. I have been fairly happy with them although I can not be sure if my problems stemmed from a bad modem pool or the fact I was 8 miles from the CO with a pair-gained F1.

The good news is that my fee is $17.95/mo/6 mo now for a 640/256 always on PPP connection. I am told I can get a fixed IP, but since I turn off the modem when I leave for more than a few hours and can not run a server, it is not a problem. The down side is that they do not allow servers, but they do furnish web space.

I had to call tech support for some of the answers to the questions like "Do you run PPP or PPPoE?" (PPP) "Can I run a server" (no).

Tech support is good, hold times range from instant to 45 minutes. Nice feature though, they have good classical/jazz/rag time music on hold and a notice of how many people ahead of you that comes on occasionally. They are mostly polite, although I had one almost rude contact, but that was a night when the entire system went down, there was no ETR, and they were probably swamped by rude idiots. All the problems I had that were related to the system or a change in the system, they did a good job of helping with.

Their web page is fair, hard to navigate, and you have to know how to get to the first menus, the home page is blank (at least on all the systems I use). But most of the important information is there.

Install co-ordination is hard to rate, I put it at 2 because of the lack of help with the phone company. Pre-sale support for DSL is lacking, they put your name in the computer and say call us when you get it. If you have problems with the QWEST sales people like I did, they do not want to hear about it. But then I suppose for $17.95, that is what I would expect. They did have all the data in place though when I did call and say "let's do it".

Actual Install co-ordination support went well, They had my name down in a variation and the support guy had to go get help to tell him that he needed to look me up by telephone number. The walk through on setting up the modem was nice, but all he did was read from the sheet that I had already downloaded off the web site. It was good that I had the walk through, the tech could see my modem, but we had a problem with the connection. After we exhausted all the options, all that was left was half the stuff between the NIC RJ45 connector and the keyboard, so off he went while I played (turned out that all I had to do was turn ZoneAlarm back on, then I was pinging and surfing happily).

Over all I am happy with Burgoyne, but we shall see what happens in the future.

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EDIT

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09June2002

Dropped Burgoyne the end of May. Tried to get them to solve my slow transfer rates and several bad tracert ping bottlenecks, but they kept saying it was my connection. Sad thing is, I had good tracerts up until I hit the Burgoyne/XO boundry and that is where I went to 300-400 msec. The same using DSLR tests. For downloads I could get 68-72 KB/s from the local file server, but my normal net download was 10-35 KB/s. Denver, and the two Calif. speed tests agreed. I tried to copy all that data to them, but either it was data overload or they did not want to hear about it. Also, I use my old mail pop in Texas, that was slow downloading too and mail uploads seemed slow (SMTP via Burgoyne).

Several times I tried to get on after 2130 and nothing, of course they turn the phone off at 2100. Left a voice mail once and checked again at 0300, still down, come 0700 it was back up. I assume since I showed a good connection on the 678, that it was the ISP and once I called QWEST and they said I looked fine.

Changed to Xmission, so far, much better.

member for 22.5 years, 3792 visits, last login: 240 days ago
updated 21.8 years ago