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Review by scottmso See Profile

  • Location: Bristow, Prince William, VA, USA
  • Cost: $29 per month
256 Kbps service comes with HOA fees, no ports blocked
Horrible customer service, speeds FAR lower than advertised during peak times
GateHouse's services are horrible. Look into getting DSL for the same price as the upgrades.
Pre Sales Information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

We moved into our house in the Braemar development recently. GateHouse provides TV and Internet here - standard cable TV as well as 256 Kbps Internet are included in the HOA fees. Upgrades to 1.5Mbps/? service are available for $19.99/month, or 3Mbps/768Kbps service for $29.99/month. Fiber is run to each home, and Internet is provided through a 10Base-FL to 10Base-T transceiver, meaning that you get a straight twisted-pair Ethernet connection.

Friday June 1 I called GateHouse to get our connection set up. They had to enter our MAC address in the database....it wouldn't be set up until Monday, June 4. Pretty ridiculous, but I waited....

On Monday it still wasn't working. I called and they didn't even enter the MAC address that day! I would have to wait until Tuesday. Tuesday came and it still didn't work - routers/PCs connected to the connection wouldn't even recognize the connection. I did some troubleshooting on my own. Turns out the cable run was probably bad - hooking the PC/router up to the fiber-twisted pair transceiver in our basement seemed to work fine. This wasn't their fault so I can't really blame them for this. I then called them and asked them to upgrade my service to 3 Mbps, now that we had the connection set up.

On Wednesday, I realized that the connection would work for anywhere from 3-15 minutes then drop for a minute or so then reconnect. After a couple of conversations, they seemed to assume that it was my router. I had tried three different routers (with MAC spoofing) so I was sure the problem was not my router. They told me to hook up a PC to make sure the routers weren't the problem. Of course that required them to add the PC's MAC address to the database, so I would have to wait till Thursday...

I tried it on Thursday.....same problem! Called them again....they worked on it and figured that it was a problem on my street. They said they would be replacing some equipment on Friday morning.

Friday comes....it's working great! I use it throughout the day and it's working nicely. This is the first night I'm able to reliably use the connection, so I do a speed test. I'm getting less than 200Kbps, as opposed to the advertised 3Mbps! Latency is horrible too....I could not get any kind of ping in the double digits. Maybe I should expect somewhat of a speed hit during busy times, but this is downright unacceptable. I have never seen anything like this before in an ISP.

And of course their cable TV sucks too. It looks like all that they do is run the cable system off of a bunch of Dish Network receivers. (is this even legal?) The other night there was a storm and I saw Dish Network "acquiring signal" screens a couple of times. Another sign of this is that you see ads targeted towards Dish Network users, and sometimes there's even severe MPEG corruption/artifacting. HDTV offerings are a joke - we don't have HDTV yet but I called GH and they offer ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox.

GateHouse is one of the most unprofessional companies I have ever dealt with. I'm going to be calling Verizon soon to get DSL here - at first I didn't think it was available but I checked again and it turns out that DSL is available here, at least according to their website. (Funny thing - their Internet services cost the exact same as the upgrades to the GateHouse service.) We might look at getting satellite TV too. I do not like that we have to pay for this horrible service when we will probably not even use the service at all.

member for 21.7 years, 12 visits, last login: 16.7 years ago
lodged 16.8 years ago


TravisC_Braemar
@camptv.com

TravisC_Braemar

Anon

Braemar Subdivision - Elliston Ct. Bristow

I really dislike not having options - and this applies to ISP(s) as well. It seems that service is slow and customer service is in place for the sake of only fulfilling obligations to the county - in order for Gateway to remain service provider for the community. I really want Verizon FiOS and believe that competition should be allowed for quality service to be promoted.
I had Verizon at my old house and things went so well I never thought about the service; It just happened (correctly).

Recently, I had a problem with connection and called the helpline and reset my router, replaced my router with new MAC, connected directly with my PC and finally had a Gateway Technician out to diagnose the problem - finally the MAC was not setup in the main office correctly. The tech was a nice guy though.

Advertised speed is not correct - shared connections and dependent on how many of your neighbors are connected.