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Review by james_junk See Profile

  • Location: Santa Rosa, Sonoma, CA, USA
  • Cost: $110 per month
I really want to be able to say something ... but I can't.
Broken promises, no follow-up, constant lies, no tech support.
Drive into town and use wifi from Starbucks. It will be more reliable.
Pre Sales Information:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

Pre Sales Information: None. Not a whisper on their website, no written promises anywhere. 0/5.

Install Co-ordination: My connection was installed by Pogowave, which was then sold to Sonic.net, which was then sold to CDS. Non-applicable.

Connection reliability: Nada. Zilch. Zero. None of the above. Could not load Google's search page reliably. 0/5.

Tech Support: Good luck. If you do get a hold of someone, they're likely to 'pass your troubles on to a technician' and you will never, ever, get a call back. Their dispatch technicians (They have two and they always dispatch out together) are polite, which raises the score to 3/5. Knock it down a notch for the technician having left without verifying the service was working, so 2/5 is the score.

Value for money: The funniest thing is that they charge for this crud.

We got rooftop wireless back in '03 or '04. Out where we live, it was delivery from dial-up, so we were extremely happy. Over the years, dealing with Pogowave and then Sonic.net, it was nice to be able to call and get a live person. Pogo went under for a number of reasons, none of them due to service. They were a good company. Sonic.net is, of course, honest and their tech support top-notch. When we called due to connection issues, the techs were obviously unfamiliar with our product (got told a couple of times that our link didn't exist, but they found it when we insisted) but did their best to get things working again.

Then we got sold to CDS. The link quickly degraded into a hell of 45% to higher packet loss and trying to call them after having dealt with Sonic.net was a slap in the face. Their support hours are 9am to 5pm weekdays only. If you have an issue after 4:30pm, you will never get a hold of a live person. If you do, the person asks you to reboot your equipment, then says they'll pass your troubles on to a technician. I regularly confused the man and woman, singular, same man or woman every time, with terms like 'ping test', 'trace route' and 'latency'. We repeatedly went through the hoops of power cycling both CPE (CPE apparently stands for nothing more than 'customer premise equipment', but that's what they called the little cream Trango box) and the router. We bypassed a superfluous router accidentally installed by Sonic.net, we purchased a new wireless router. We asked them repeatedly to replace our antenna, to replace our CPE, to dispatch a technician. Always it was 'we'll pass your report to our technician and get back to you'.

I fully believed at that time the problem was with our aging equipment, but Trango radios and Mikrotic antennas aren't something one can simply pick up at a Best Buy.

Finally, our case got escalated to Steve, the owner of the company. Boy howdy is he a charmer and a sweet-talker. He assured us constantly that he had just run a new line in, very expensive, but don't worry, there wouldn't be an increase to our bill, to our tower. It should clear up everything. Our speeds, he said, would be lightning fast (what do speeds matter when you're getting so much packet loss that nothing loads?), just give it a few days. He told us this three times over the space of six months. The first time, I trusted him and wasted $50 on a web seminar that I wasn't able to watch or listen to due to the connection having about 35% packet loss during the duration of the seminar. I became more and more skeptical the more he repeated himself.

If you email in, even if you cc him, don't expect to get a response for at least three days to a week. If you send repeated emails, he will get irritated and stop responding all together.

Eventually, after about a year, we were able to arrange for a technician dispatch. They came on time, wore booties in the house, were very respectful when they told us that they were not able to improve the connection because the tower had moved to a lower point and there were now trees about half a mile away obstructing the view of the antenna. They raised the antenna about six to eight feet, promised to order a new antenna and left.

We discovered, not five minutes after they left, that we had no connection at all. Not even the limping, latency-ridden, packet-dropping nightmare we had experienced until then. We tried to call the technician on the number he left, no answer. It was after 4:30pm by this point, so though we tried to call their home office (repeatedly), we only got their answering machine. They never called back, never delivered the promised new antenna and never followed up.

We canceled service. Four months later, the antenna is still on our roof, awaiting CDS to call us and arrange for one of their technicians to come, take it down and haul it away.

member for 9.6 years, 26 visits, last login: 9.3 years ago
updated 9.6 years ago


Review by Clueless Too See Profile

  • Location: Calistoga, Napa, CA, USA
  • Cost: $50 per month
  • Install: about 10 days
r
Pre Sales Information:
Install process:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

Since the installation 3 days ago I cannot stop smiling.

I live in a mountainous and largely undeveloped rural area, 7 miles from the
nearest town and 1 mile from the nearest neighbor I have suffered years of
noisy and incredibly slow dial-up lines, the onerous data limits and prohibitive
expense of satellite, and witnessed the decline of cellular from barely
adequate (when I was one of the few users connected to my local tower) to
the current sorry state of congestion and overload (unusable during daylight
hours, less than a third of its former speed during a steadily shrinking
"usable" period in the wee hours of the morning.

My desperate search for any viable alternative ended when dslreports.com
and its broadband search led me to CDS Wireless DSL, for which I am
most grateful and send dslreports,com a huge and heartfelt "Thank You!"

My e-mail inquiry to CDS Wireless was answered within 1 hour by a friendly
and technically informative phone call from one of the owners, followed 10
days later by a friendly, informal, and technically flawless installation.

The service so far meets or exceeds the speed and quality of standard wired
DSL, which for someone who had resigned himself to never being able to
have that level of speed and quality, is like heaven. That is why I can't stop
smiling.

member for 17 years, 59 visits, last login: 10.3 years ago
lodged 10.4 years ago


Review by WestSonomaCo See Profile

  • Location: Occidental, Sonoma, CA, USA
  • Cost: $89 per month
Dont get CDS unless it is your only choice
Dont get CDS unless it is your only choice
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

If it is your only choice RUN, or Move.
They don't pick up the phone
They don't know what they are doing
they think it is ok to make customers wait weeks to have internet!! Digital Divide is here.
they have lost desparate customers to Excede Satelite if you can imagine?????/

member for 10.6 years, driveby review (so far)
lodged 10.6 years ago







Review by rfrary See Profile

  • Location: Sebastopol, Sonoma, CA, USA
  • Cost: $65 per month (12 month contract)
  • Install: about 7 days
Dependable 'Always-on' wireless Broadband connection
A little slower than some other 'wired' broadband services
Trouble free equip. worked flawlessly for the nearly 4 yrs subscribed
Pre Sales Information:
Install process:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

They're Great! Where no other solution exists, other than dial-up, they provide a stable broadband connection at a very competitive price. Their customer support has improved by 'leaps and bounds' over the last 2 years and is now top notch. I'd still be with them but phone dsl finally became available and I couldn't resist the 6+ megabit download speed for $40 / mo.

[old review]: Where no other solution other than dial-up is available, they provide a stable broadband connection at a very competitive price. Just hope you don't need any live communication with them, because you'll never get a call back if you leave a message on their answering machine. Other than that I'd have to say that they're great!

(note from dslreports:) [Here at the dslreports.com offices we still look back with pleasure at the day your review arrived. We all gathered around the printer as it clicked out those fateful words " Where no other solution ..". After we were done reading, and tissues had been passed around, we framed the review and hung it on our wall where, to this day, it still has the power to move vistors to tears.]

member for 22.9 years, 364 visits, last login: 1.2 years ago
updated 13.9 years ago