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Review by drbadass 
member for 8.7 years, 657 visits, last login: 4.4 years ago
lodged 4.4 years ago
 Philadelphia,Philadelphia,PA
 Contract price not specified.  "None" "Doesn't work, bad pre-sales info, support sucks." "Not ready for prime-time!"
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Philly WiFi has been available in certain neighborhoods for a while but one day I realized it was ready in my neighborhood. So I immediately signed up. I called so that I could ask a few questions. My big question, could I be using the service linked to my account in more than one location at a time (ie have my home connection connected while being out in the city somewhere connected with a laptop or iPhone). The pre-sales guy said yes, that was fine to do.
So I decided to order. Upon ordering, they do tell you that they "recommend" the modem, but only after I ordered the service without it and dug around on google did I find some other users saying that you basically need the modem, no way around it. Some later testing found that if I was outside in front of my house, I would get a single bar connection, but nothing inside. So I went to order my modem and was told that since I opted not to buy it when I first ordered, I no longer had the option of renting for $4/month. Kind of stupid, but no big deal. Then, they wanted $20 shipping to ship ground. That was a big deal. But I was willing to deal with it from all that I would save on the service.
When I got my modem, I set it up and got nothing. Please know that the antenna on this thing is about 12 inches long. I tried it in a bunch of places, near windows, etc. Only one place in my house where I could get signal, and that was with the modem perched up on the window pane in the front of my house, no where near where I have all my computer stuff.
I called support on Thursday and after sitting in support queues for 20 minutes, I explained my problem. Doing some diagnostics, I was seeing lots of Earthlink signals, but none of them were the secure signals. After about 30 minutes, they said they'd need to have field techs work on this and that in 24 hours, it would definitely work. I wanted it to work, so I went along.
24 hours later, no change. I called up again, this time Friday, went through the same 20-30 minute wait time. The support person explained that they needed the tech to go back out and reconfigure the interface in my area, but in 24 hours, it would definitely work. This was strike two, but again, $20 bucks, you want it to work.
The next Tuesday, things were still not working any differently. So I decided that was strike three, and this thing is just not ready for the level of stability we all expect from our telecommunications systems. The queue this day was horrendous. I kept getting disconnected after long wait times. Then, after accidentally hitting Spanish, I got right to a tech, this time not in India, but an American. He was very helpful, actually cared about getting me some information, but then had to send me back to India.
I finally got a woman on the phone and asked to cancel my service. She immediately asked for me to give her 24 hours to get it fixed and it would then definitely work. I explained it was too late, I would maybe try the service again in 6 months, but now wasn't the time. She kept pleading for more time, then offered me a $20 dollar credit. I kept telling her I wanted my money back. At one point, she explained that there was an outage in my area. I then asked why the outage did not show on their live google map overlay of system outages on the web. She said something like the services was still being configured.
At this point, I'm annoyed and I'm demanding a refund. Finally, the woman gives in, says she'll process the refund. At that moment and onward, she was really nasty to me. She first said that she'd refund the service. I then asked about the modem, which she replied I had to keep, because I bought it. This thing was $70+$20 shipping, no way! I fought with her on that for a few minutes, then she agreed to take that back. She refused to give me the shipping charge refund, but I didn't push too hard, as I had spent almost two hours on the phone at this point.
In the end, all the refunds were processed, and I'm back with Comcast. But I could not believe how this company was treating me as a customer. They're certainly not doing themselves any favors there. I hope someday the service works, but for now, it's just not ready for prime-time.
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 Review by neuronix
member for 11.3 years, 432 visits, last login: 1.8 years ago
lodged 4.5 years ago
- Philadelphia,Philadelphia,PA
- $20 per month
- "None"
- "Tech support is completely useless"
- "This service does not work for me and likely never well"
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Install process:
Connection reliability:
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I am a current Comcast HSI customer and am pretty happy with their service. I signed up for Earthlink WiFi because it's cheap and I would like to dump my cable service along with it. I live in an area of Philadelphia that recently added Earthlink WiFi service. I ordered the 1Mbit up/down package for $7 for the first 6 months and $20 thereafter.
I signed up online through text chat thinking that would be easy. I had several questions for the person who signed me up. The first question they got wrong was, would I be able to simply use my laptop on their network from my apartment since I could see their network? They said yes, so I did not get a WiFi modem. The real scoop turned out to be your standard laptop doesn't have enough transfer power to get out of the house to the WiFi router.
So I modded my WRT54Gv4 with 7dBi antennas and turned it into a repeater to use the service. My pings to the first hop past my wireless repeater are almost consistantly low and without loss. According to DD-WRT, my connection to the Earthlink wireless access point is stronger than the connection to my laptop in the same room. However, my traceroutes and pings past that are high latency and with much packet loss. This is within Earthlink's network.
Attempts to get this problem resolved have been completely ignored. I have been put on hold for long amounts of time. I am told that the "problem will be fixed within 24-48 hours" so fast I'm sure the person never even checked if that was the case. I have been told to install software that doesn't exist. I have been told to install patches that have nothing to do with my problem. I have been transferred around in a circle, twice. Tech support is full of simple conflict resolution phrases like "I'm sorry you have had difficulties Mr. ***" and "I understand your concerns Mr. ***", but they do not understand what I am telling them. I explain to them what I have just explained to you in the last paragraph, and they do not ever attempt to address those problems. Never has one attempted to traceroute me, for example, to see if they see the same problems from their end. When I used to work tier 2 tech support, that's the first thing I would have done. I'm convinced they don't even know what I'm talking about. I have never been transferred to tier 2. I have asked several times and am simply transferred to someone just as clueless.
I am now over two weeks since I signed up. The service has been barely useable about 25% of the times I tried. When it works at all, speeds on the tester are around dialup speed and severe latency and packet loss means it takes a long time to load websites.
I was surprised to find my neighbor at work sending back his Pepwave surf yesterday. He had similar problems and also could not get them resolved. From posts on Internet forums it is obvious that many people are having trouble with the WiFi service, and my impression is that will not change as long as there is no method to report these problems.
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