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Review by (hidden by request)
(review was emailed from domain gmail.com)
lodged 1.1 years ago
 35802
 $40 per month- (12 month contract)
 AT&T "Customer support & spam filtering" "Core service is still AT&T" "Worth the additional cost just to avoid having having to deal with AT&T. The spam filtering is just bonus!"
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We've been using HiWAAY since we were on dialup more than 10 years ago. Their customer service is great. We have used their DSL for more than 5 years and have always been satisfied with their support. While what they offer really is just re-branded AT&T/Bellsouth DSL service, their spam filtering, email service and support more than justify the premium cost. AT&T acts like they are doing you a favor by letting you wait on hold and then provide support that always assumes you are the problem. The folks at HiWAAY have never been anything but professional. The line performance is always in the top end of rated through-put when we test it. They offer a full plate of speeds and are easy to work with if you want to change your speed. We could save some money, maybe 10% or 20%, by going with AT&T directly, but not having to deal with AT&T far outweighs a few dollars a month. The spam filter they use works so well I cannot believe how much crap the other ISPs allow through when I am working on someone else's home system.
While their name is odd to people who aren't familiar with the backstory of their association with WAAY 1550 AM and TV's channel 31here in north Alabama, they really are a spectacular example of how a small business can take a commodity product and make it something that has true added value. And I write this as we are in the middle of a 24 hour outage of service because AT&T broke something on their end in north Alabama. I got an email to HiWAAY support from my phone at 5:30 pm on a Thursday night and by 6:00 I had an answer from the support folks at HiWAAY.
Excellent product from my experience. They are the only ISP I recommend.
Kurt Schultz
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 Review by DirtySouth 
member for 12 years, 3163 visits, last login: 1 year ago
updated 6.8 years ago
- 35210
- $44 per month
- (month by month)
 about 10 days- BellSouth
- "Very stable and consistant, very little down time, great support, seems to have good relationship with Bellsouth."
- "Hmm..bad points...umm..they spelled"
- "Excellent ISP. Couldn't be happier"
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******* UPDATE *******
It's been almost 5 years that I've been a subscriber to Hiwaay, and nothing's changed. Still very consistant, stable, and reliable. Can't even remember the last outage.
Only thing I could say is that I wish they offered higher speeds. They're pretty much under the umbrella of Bellsouth, and pretty much resells what Bellsouth offers. If they ever offer a speed higher than 3MB, I'd be estatic, as I'm really looking for a reason to drop Roadrunner.
Anyway, like I stated before, if you want DSL, and want an alternative to Bellsouth, I still highly recommend Hiwaay.
******* END UPDATE *******
Note: at the time of activation, they were running a promotion: $44.95 month-to-month with free modem (Speedstream 4060) and activation. Plan also included unlimited dialup. The pricing, plans, and modems have changed drastically, although I am still on the original plan.
Package: $44.95/mo for 1.5MB/256K DSL ( 125X/22X) actual speeds
unlimited dial-up
dynamic IP, PPPoA
6 e-mail addresses
50MB webspace
I've used this ISP for over 2 years, so I guess it's time to review them.
Back in summer of 2000, after of years of being on dialup (14.4, I might add), I found out that Bellsouth finally upgraded the neighborhood's CO for DSL. Wanting to go with a local instead of a regional/national provider, and since I was a HiWAAY dialup customer, I decided to go with them for DSL, so I immediately ordered and the next day they confirmed my order.
10 days later (would've been 7, but I took too long to reply to the e-mails and phone calls.), a head HiWAAY tech , Mr. William Reeder brought the modem and did all the installations, but no synch. No synch at the NID. He contacted Bellsouth and a ticket was opened. A day later a friendly Bellsouth Tech arrived (I was worried at first when she said she wanted to check my "ALSD"). She checked the nid, and went to the CO to find out that my line was mis-provisioned. About an hour later, Mr. Reeder called me to inform me that my connection was fixed, and it's been smooth sailing ever since
The connection's been incredibly stable over the last 2 years, with only a 12k fluctuation in the download speed results from all the numerous speed tests I've taken (1248 to 1261). I can recall only 3 "hiccups" in the service, and even then, I barely remember them; 1 black out and 2 "brown outs" (severe packet and speed loss), but they were short lived.
One thing I like to comment on is HiWAAY's network status page. It shows a lot of useful information about their network. Everything from up/down status of various services, to maintenance announcements , to network traffic, to connectivity to various backbones, to packet loss and latency within the network, to backbones and supernodes, and even the amount of spam received. All of this is updated on the fly and this is great information to pass on to the customers, and it especially helps in troubleshooting. On one of the 2 times that had packet loss and slow speed, I checked their network status page, and sure enough the charts showed there was packet loss at the Birmingham node. This also narrows potential problems down, as if a customer is having problems, and it doesn't show up on the status page, then most likely it's an isolated problem. Also, if there's ever any sudden, unforseen problems, once it's solved, they put up an announcement that there was a problem, and the steps done to solve it. All of this just adds to the service, and more ISP's should do this, as I'm sure it would cut down on the majority of the hassle and headaches that happen.
I only had to call tech support one time, due to an issue that was totally my fault (billing issues with the telco. The phone service was re-activated, but not the DSL) They contacted Bellsouth, and the service was restored immediately, so 5 stars for that also
Newsgroup access is excellent, with 2 servers from different providers
I would like to thank Mr. Reeder for keeping in constant contact with me during those initial installation problems. He keep me well informed on what was going on. (I still gave them 5 stars in install co-ordination because it really wasn't HiWAAY's fault, and I was the first to get DSL out of that CO, so of course it was uncharted territory)
Bottom line is that I'm completely happy with HiWAAY DSL, and I would recommend it to anyone in the Birmingham area who wants an alternative and to try a local provider for high speed access
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 Review by gc444
member for 11.4 years, 2749 visits, last login: 76 days ago
lodged 9.2 years ago
- 35126
- $50 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 5 days
- BellSouth
- "Quick Installation, Great Ping Times, Great Download Speeds"
- "My IP address changes several times weekly"
- "A very good alternative to BellSouth if they are in your area"
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I started looking for a new ISP around January when BellSouth was still routing customers in Alabama to New Orleans. I did not have a lot of other choices for my ISP since Covad was no longer in my area so I knew I had to pick a local ISP unless I wanted to go with something like MSN or AOL (which I did not). I had heard good things about HiWAAY in the past and I checked out their site and they had some useful information such as system status and amount of bandwidth being used, little stuff that is just nice to know. I decided to sign up with them and at the time the deal was $50.00 a month if you signed up for 18 months and I had a $60 activation fee since I had my own equipment. If I had purchased their equipment I would have got a free month as well as free activation. Right after I signed up they ran a promotion that dropped the contract to 12 months so they were able to switch mine to that plan.
I ordered service on a Thursday and it was turned on the very next Tuesday. In fact I was still surfing with my BellSouth DSL on Monday night so I was really never down since they did the switch while I was at work. When I came home I changed my router to use PPPOA and put in my HiWAAY user ID and password and I was off. The speed was identical to BellSouth (1250/220), but my ping times to East Coast servers (especially Atlanta) dropped back to where they used to be before BellSouth changed all the routing (pinging dslreports around 40ms). I was able to enjoy gaming a little bit more since I was not pinging 100+ on some of my favorite servers.
The account comes with 10 e-mail accounts compared to only 5 with BellSouth. It also comes with 30 hours of dialup (weekends do not count against your time) compared with only 20 hours with BellSouth. In fact other than the annoying IP address change that happens so often I have had no complaints. I found a dynamic DNS service that runs for me so I can keep up with it so that is not so bad.
BellSouth has corrected the routing issue (for most of Alabama) but if HiWAAY continues to give the level of service I have experienced so far I do not see a reason to switch back.
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 Review by mfwizard
member for 11.5 years, 1260 visits, last login: 1 year ago
updated 9.3 years ago
- 35802
- $60 per month
- (12 month contract)
- BellSouth
- "Great reliability and tech support"
- "No notification of important network changes"
- "Overall, Awesome"
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I am currently using HiWAAY Internet Services for my local ISP. They
service most of Alabama and parts of Georgia and Tennessee. In the last
year, they have narrowed their DSL focus so as to only service customers who
are using routers. They had so much difficulty in supporting multiple
configurations of modem/machine/operating system that in order to provide
high quality service, they had to confine their support to existing modem
customers while only adding new service for router customers only.
HiWAAY provides DSL services over BellSouth lines. The service has been
tremendously good. My line speeds are capped at 1.5/256 and I am actually
achieving 1280/228 on a regular basis. Their costs are detailed on their
website, but right now the cost of a DSL connection is $59.95 with a $99.95
activation fee. They will sell you a router for $169.95 at sign up. I
chose to purchase my own router since I was a modem customer at the time.
I have had very little occasion to use their support facilities since I
switched to a router. When I have called, the support personnel have been
friendly and have gone out of their way to try and solve whatever minor
problems I have encountered. My biggest beef with them is that several major changes have been made to their IP addressing structure recently which caused me to have disrupted service for the first time in 3 years. Expansion of their DSL client base made the changes necessary, but no notification was given to existing customers who needed to make changes in their IP Gateway addresses. They eventually figured out what was causing my issue, and now I am back in business. The problem was isolated to a particular router type, and I feel that they could have been more proactive. Anyway, the problem is now solved and I am happily surfing away.
Overall, I would have to give HiWAAY high marks for dependability and
customer service. At one time, I had both HiWAAY and BellSouth Fastaccess
installed for comparison. I chose HiWAAY due to their support and
availability performance.
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Review by SnittyKitty2
member for 9.5 years, 12 visits, last login: 4.6 years ago
lodged 9.5 years ago
- 36804
- $21 per month
- BellSouth
- "Terrific customer support"
- "None"
- "Terrific ISP, terrific everything!"
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ISPs could learn a thing or two about HiWAAY. Terrific support. Email notification of upcoming outages and other outages like email that have occurred.
We live in the woods...backwoods! We do have BellSouth phone lines and service, and the relationship between HiWAAY and BellSouth by all the accounts I've read is excellent.
HiWAAY is not very well known; it should be! The everyday users I talk to have never heard of them, and they live in the Auburn-Opelika area. They are known in the Montgomery, Birmingham and Huntsville area, hince the name, HiWAAY, in which WAAY, a television station in Huntsville are owned by the same person.
If you plan to upgrade to their DSL service, the upfront cost are a bit high, but if you plan to network your computers, you'll in the end save money. They require you to purchase a router; not a modem. You have the choice of USB or Ethernet card. And you have the choice of 3 plans, the 1st requiring a 18 month commitment with their service.
At this time, we continue to use dial up service. In one computer, we updated the modem so it would be compatible with WinXP Home. It has never connected less than 52, 667 bps, and the v.90's at 48,000 and 49,200 bps.
It's funny, we have DSL service, but no city water! That gives you a good idea how deep in the woods we are! However, we're close enough for DSL, given that BellSouth was nice enough to install a DSLAM within 3 miles of us!
You can learn more about HiWAAY at www.hiwaay.net.
Bill Berry
Beulah, AL
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