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Review by kshusker 
UPDATED: 52 days ago
member for 52 days, 37 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Lawrence,Douglas,KS
 $120 per month
 about 1 days
 "Local company, fast download speeds"
 "Slow upload speeds, bandwidth caps, network congestion"
 "Good choice for casual internet users, poor choice for heavy users"
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We've had Sunflower's internet service since the beginning, in the late 1990s. We've used them for cable, telephone and internet (the internet portion of our bill is about $55)
The positives are that they are a a local company in Lawrence; when you call someone, you are talking to a local call center and they are generally very responsive.
The download speed of the service itself (we have used the top level, Gold) when network use is light is as good as advertised, a solid 20 mbit down (they are upgrading to DOCSIS 3.0 and 50 mbit down in November). However, in the evenings and during other periods of heavy use, the speed slows down, sometimes significantly.
Additionally, the upload speeds are terrible, only 1 mbit at the most expensive tier of service (even with the new DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade), which makes Sunflower useless for things like online backup, or uploading to video sites, etc.
Lots of people have complained about the low bandwidth caps, and I don't have much to add here. You basically always need to be cognizant of your cap (to Sunflowers credit they have a good monitoring system; you can view your use by the month, week, day and hour) and how much data you are using, kind of like in the old days with dial-up AOL, where you had so many minutes a month and the clock was always running.
I think Sunflower is a good choice if you are a light internet user, who just wants to do some surfing and email, but if you are a heavy user or someone who needs faster upload speed, you might want to see if U-Verse is available yet in your neighborhood.
I should note for the record Sunflower is starting to advertise an unlimited bandwidth service called Palladium, with variable speeds but no bandwidth limits. This might be something some folks would want to look in to, but I have no experience with it.
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Review by RKhoury
Posted: 87 days ago
member for 1.1 years, 229 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Lawrence,Douglas,KS
$49 per month
about 1 days
"99+% up time. Nearly every CSR I've talked too has known their stuff."
"Nary a one worth complaining about"
"Beats local AT&T DSL service in every category."
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I've been a Sunflower internet customer since the old Zenith cable modems were state of the art and outside of enduring the learning curve with them at that time the ride has been a good one.
On the technology side Sunflower is now starting to roll out Docsis 3 service which will have a price point of $49.99/month with no bandwith caps.
As to my comment on DSL service, up until recently my employer had one of our local facilites on At&T DSL service and we/I continually had both connectivity and email log-in server problems.
My current service with Sunflower consist of an internet feed, cable TV feed (with HD content) and telephone (VOIP) and I'm always amazed at how well everything works.
Followup comments:  Dampier
Phillip M Dampier
join:2003-03-23
Rochester, NY
| Caps If you have any additional information about their $50 service not having any usage caps, can you drop me a note? I'd like to write it up for Stop the Cap! I'd be impressed if Sunflower actually did this, because every speech coming out of the CEO implies caps are here to stay. | |
| | RKhoury
join:2008-10-22
Lawrence, KS
 ·Sunflower Broadband
1 edit | Re: Caps On the usage cap request, here is the link to the page showing what is going on.
»www.sunflowerbroadband.com/internet/
Gold is currently DOCSIS 2, with Paladium being 3.
As I understand current plans Gold will migrate to 3 (as is shown on the page) once 3 is up and running with no problems.
The up and down speeds are for now considered to be variable, however from what I've read in their forum area those will stabilize some once the deployment of 3 is done.
Also the page will show Gold as having a 50 Gig Cap. Sunflower announced that they bumped this to 70 to see how much it affects their network...etc. Silver has been bumped from 15 to 25 under the same thought process | |
| | | Dampier
Phillip M Dampier
join:2003-03-23
Rochester, NY
| Re: Caps Thanks. Since I can't find a way for non-customers to access their forums, can you cut and paste any recent forum threads that relate to subscriber views on usage caps, variable speed, and their thinking/methodology on this and send them to me as private message or e-mail (if you click on my name on the left you should find windows for either option.)
I will write this up as a story, but am very curious over what precisely the speeds are and whether they vary for individual customers depending on usage. If it varies per account, it could be similar to the Australian model of slowing down specific accounts when usage is "excessive." If it's a common experience among every user on this speed option, that is a novel approach.
Thanks in advance! | |
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Review by mlundin
Posted: 156 days ago
member for 8.6 years, 662 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Lawrence,Douglas,KS
$39 per month
"Umm... it USUALLY works. Pretty decent customer service."
"low bandwith caps, high overage fees"
"You don't have a choice."
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This is an internet service provider that has relatively low usage caps and charges extremely high fees for going over the limit. Service is usually reliable when it comes to internet (TV is a different story). Unfortunately, there really aren't a lot of options. AT&T might have DSL where you live, but U-Verse is still in its infancy in Lawrence. Basically, you don't have a choice.
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Review by kae
UPDATED: 1.3 years ago
member for 7.6 years, 221 visits, last login: 17 days ago
Lawrence,Douglas,KS
$49 per month
about 7 days
"It's pretty fast and fairly reliable"
"It has download limits and going over is costly"
"It's the fastest thing in the area"
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We have the Gold package for about $49.95 per month, but we also subscribe to their phone service and some cable tv services so that probably reduces some of the individual prices on the internet services as it comes as a package. The gold service is supposed to be for up to 4 PCs, Up to 21 Mbps Download, 5 e-mail accounts, 40 Gb bandwidth usage. Anything above 40Gb gets billed at $2/Gb.
The cable modem is a Motorola SURFboard.
I've seen download speeds up to 19895 kbps with upload around 726 kbps.
As for the internet product, I like the service. It can be slower than 19Mbps. What I've seen is that it has good burst speeds up to a point (like maybe 100MB, but then it seems to slow down and it gets into a steady bandwidth, which is still acceptable.
Customer support is not great, but pretty typical for a large corporation. Our service got shutdown once because they said we had a worm/trojan. I wanted to know the virus name and what damage was done, but I couldn't really get much information from them, and since we have several computers in the house sitting behind a router it would take a while to trace it down. I suspect that someone went to a web page and allowed it to run a JavaScript or some application which tripped the virus/trojan flag. I live with other people and while I have Firefox running on all of my PCs and Macs and I use NOSCRIPT, I can't guarantee what the others use. I can only encourage diligence. Anyway, it was difficult to get them to turn it back on. They wanted assurance from a "Certified" professional that the virus/trojan was gone. I guess they didn't think my 28 years of computer consulting was good enough. The guy who subscribed told them I was a certified professional. Anyway, they told us that if it happened again that it would require us to submit to them a letter from a certified networking professional that the computer systems were virus free. I understand their ardor, but it seems a little onerous for the typical home computer user. The real pain is that I had to go to a coffee shop to download updates to a virus program that was out of date. So, I guess this kind of colors my thoughts on their customer support.
I'm pretty happy with the service otherwise. The only thing I'm not happy with is that I think their $2/Gb price for going over the download limit is too high. I pay $49.95 for 40Gb and I think that I should be able to get an equal or lower price if I go over. I think the price should be more like $1/Gb or less. Even if they prorated it to $1.25/Gb, which would be what I pay for 40Gb, that would be better than $2/Gb. The price for going over the limit is more of a punishment for bad behavior than anything. I purchased one of the seasons of Farscape from iTunes and ended up going over the limit.
I guess that's my experience. If they would fix the fee for going over the download limit, then I would be happier with the service.
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Review by bpapa
Posted: 2.2 years ago
member for 2.2 years, 1 visits, last login: 2.2 years ago
Lawrence,Douglas,KS
$40 per month
"Great customer service! Best connection speeds available in area. I've never noticed any downtime since getting it 4 years ago."
"Connection speeds rarely capable of advertized speeds, but that is not uncommon."
"For the money, easily the best network option in area."
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I switched from AT&T DSL over 4 years ago (I had a terrible experience with AT&T DSL, bad service, poor install support, frequent billing errors, crappy speeds, long contract, etc.). I am going to roughly break up my review based on the 6 categories of service listed in the rating scheme: Presales info, Install Co-ord, Reliability, Support, Services and Value.
I like Sunflower’s website, you can monitor your bandwidth usage so you can purchase additional units before you go over your limit, and their pricing and packaging options are relatively straight forward, and tech support by phone or email is readily available. They also have a pretty good web-mail setup if you choose to use the free email accounts that come with their broadband packages (I don’t use mine, I already have three other email accounts…)
If your residence is properly equipped for the service they typically will be able to connect you that day or the next. Simply provide the MAC addy of your modem or pick up a rental modem at their Downtown Lawrence offices and you are done.
I have never seen Sunflower require a contract. Sometimes they run specials where you can upgrade to a higher level of service for free for the first 3 months or so on only a 6 month or so contract, but the contract only applies to the data service so you can still cancel/change your TV/phone accounts if you wish.
As I have said, I have had Sunflower Cable service for over 4 years, and I have never noticed any downtime! I have had some downtime; but every time after trouble-shooting I discovered it was either the fault of my modem (not a rental until recently) or my router (or because I forgot to pay my bill, Doh!).
Based on my experience Sunflower's tech support, although reluctant to look into more fidgety detail issues at times, does tend to be very thorough once they actually assign you a trouble ticket. But honestly I haven’t really needed to rely on their support many times throughout my time using their service; I have had very few problems…
They offer 6Mb, 10Mb and 20Mb packages that each come with a respective bandwidth allowance. I upgraded to the 20Mb “Gold” package about a year ago when that speed first became available; it comes with 30gb/mo of bandwidth allowance. All packages have the option to buy 30gb blocks of bandwidth in advance for $30 or $1/1gb, going over your allowance without purchasing additional bandwidth will incur steeper charges the rate of which though I do not recall off the top of my head.
I reviewed the other broadband options available in Lawrence, KS about a year ago and decided to stay with Sunflower. Based on what I saw then; there wasn’t really much for me to think about. Sunflower really was the best value considering my major broadband concerns were speed and bandwidth allowance.
NOTES:
One thing that I recently discovered about Sunflower’s network is that it can be picky about modems. I had a Linksys cable modem for my first three years with Sunflower and was consistently dismayed with my actual connection speeds (turns out that although I still love Linksys routers/switches, their cable modem kind of sucks). I recently bit the bullet and rented one of Sunflower’s top-of-the-line (according to them) modems for $5/mo. The modem they gave me is a Motorola Surfboard SB5101, and to my initial surprise it did significantly increase my actual connection speeds both based on the speed tests on this site and several others I have found. Now my connection averages around 18,000kbps on off network speed tests (the speed test on Sunflower’s own servers does typically average around or slightly in excess of the advertised 20Mbps, but obviously there is practically no ‘real world’ traffic between my connection and their servers). I have also found that the Motorola modem is significantly more reliable than the Linksys modem I had; which I typically needed to reset several times a week. Overall I have more reliability issues with my local network/router than with my residential broadband connection!
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Review by Ayo
Posted: 2.2 years ago
member for 6 years, 128 visits, last login: 21 days ago
Lawrence,Douglas,KS
$40 per month (13 month contract)
"They are trying to give service"
"Their broadband service has issues which they don't manage to solve"
"I'm about to switch to another operator.."
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I've had Sunflower Broadband for a bit over a year, while it was pretty good in the begining, it is degrading in the past could of months. At this point due to unclear reason I can't use my VoIP line nor use variety of Video and voice related applications. They've been trying to trouble shoot it, without success. At this point I'm just tired and their service is not good (and this is even though I have their gold service!!)
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