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Review by avitronx 
member for 10.9 years, 12 visits, last login: 9.5 years ago
updated 10.8 years ago
 La Porte,Harris,TX
 $69 per month- (12 month contract)
 about 14 days Southwestern Bell- CLEC party: Covad
 "Very few downtimes" "$$$$$$Very Expensive for 144/144" "Only thing better than 56k in the area"
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I have been with Firstworld for a year and have only been down a few times. Their customer service to me was great. I only wish the connection was faster and the price was cheaper.
Look what happens when you say something good about a company. They leave you. Earthlink stated they would p/u my IDSL service for $129.99 per month!!!. You've got to be kidding!!
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Review by kulick
member for 10.8 years, 4 visits, last login: 3.9 years ago
lodged 10.8 years ago
- Mountain View,Santa Clara,CA
- $130 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 25 days
- SBC
- CLEC party: Covad
- "I used to be a Sirius customer..."
- "Can't administer their own equip, terrible cust. support, conn. drops"
- "Avoid at all costs (under any name)"
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I was another very satisfied Sirius customer. I had under 3hrs of down time in my 2.5+ yrs with them. I was notified about a month after Firstworld bought them out. I did not want to have to reconfigure all of my services/machines with new IPs so I stayed with them. I was no longer under an extended contract.
I did not and do not use any Firstworld DNS hosting, web hosting, email hosting so I really don't have much need for interaction with my ISP. All I want and all I need is a stable connection. In Dec 2000, my connection had an unscheduled, inexplicable 6 day down period. Firstworld/Verado finally got the problem fixed, but never followed through on any email or phone call they promised to return. Like many others that have posted here, I had my share of calls to clueless techs, long hold times, and listening to outright lies.
Since the problems in Dec 2000, my connection has experienced regular, unscheduled outages. These problems normally have to do with routers inside the Firstworld/Verado network. I have frequently seen traceroutes that loop infinitely between two IPs in their network. These problems tend to last anywhere from 5 minutes to 5 hours. Over the last few months the outages seemed to occur 5 to 25 times per day. Normally, the shorter the individual outage time, the more frequent the occurence. I have been told that the problem lies (1) with Covad, (2) with my own computer (it doesn't), (3) with the DSLAM, (4) with my wiring.
My personal favorite story however is this: Numerous times I have called to notify them (politely at first and later more sternly) that their router is "confused" or my network is down, only to be placed on hold. While waiting, I continue to ping and traceroute certain parts of the network and lo, it mysteriously begins to work. Upon the return of the tech support person, I am informed that everything is just fine and that all of their tests check out. Maybe it is my computer they offer. I should reload Windows (whatever the f*** that means (I'm on an Irix or Linux box)) and try again. "We have numerous systems to track our network and would already know if there was really a problem", they try to reassure. I am not reassured. 
Finally, getting them to bill regularly or deduct when I have connectivity outages of upwards of 1/3 of a month is a nightmare.
I guess the thing that pisses me off the most is that they killed Sirius, which was for me, a great ISP...
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Review by (hidden by request)
(review was emailed from domain acuson.com)
lodged 10.8 years ago
- Hayward,Alameda,CA
- $22 per month
- "nothing"
- "everything, especially customer service"
- "FirstWorld is basically a holding company buying up small ISPs, the dead feeding off the living, until as many dollars as possib"
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At the risk of "piling on", I just wanted to say that this company is
AWFUL!!! They took a perfectly good ISP (sirius) and ran it completely
into the dirt. And they raised their prices in the process. These
people should be taken out back, and...
well, bad things should happen to them...
rfhurley, formerly of @sirius.com
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At the risk of "piling on", I just wanted to say that this company is AWFUL!!!
They took a perfectly good ISP (sirius) and ran it completely into
the dirt. And they raised their prices in the process. These
people should be taken out back, and...
well, bad things should happen to them...
rfhurley, formerly of @sirius.com
--------------8D39C62D5530443826C650D3--
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Review by bmcdonnell
member for 10.9 years, 20 visits, last login: 9.5 years ago
lodged 10.9 years ago
- San Francisco,San Francisco,CA
- $300 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 60 days
- Covad
- CLEC party: Covad
- "You can reach a tech person quickly"
- "50% of techs are ignorant, service very unreliable, speeds much less than promised"
- "Find someone else. Current customers: switch before they go broke."
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We have 1.1 SDSL and the speeds never reach that. Typical dslreports speed test results are 640/60. This is abysmal and First World will do nothing to help. More than half the techs know little about networking (although the other half are pretty good). They have regular interruptions in service with no warning or updates. Usually interruptions last 3 to 4 days; we've had about 5 interruptions so far this year.
While most folks won't experience this problem, here's a little anecdote to show their level of service. We've had one of our domains administered from their servers for many years. Apparently this domain was attached to a dialup account and a couple of weeks ago they sold their dialup accounts to EarthLink. They didn't notify us, but what's worse is that they deleted the zone file from their servers! It took 3 days talking with the tech support crew to finally figure out what had happened. To the credit of the individuals involved, they apologized profusely. But they also criticized their own company saying they didn't know why that had happened and that they would understand if we choose a different ISP.
I know a lot of folks say DON"T CHOSE THIS ISP! Still it applies in this case. Unless, of course, you're willing to accept 1/10 of the speed you pay for and be knocked off-line without warning several days per month.
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Review by pixelprincess
member for 11 years, 6 visits, last login: 10.7 years ago
lodged 11 years ago
- San Francisco,San Francisco,CA
- $49 per month
- (12 month contract)
- SBC
- CLEC party: Covad
- "Stayed with First World because of history with sirius.com"
- "Beware of the Billing/customer service dept. I think they are scamming poeple"
- "Stay away from them!!!!!!"
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I am posting this review to share my HORROR story with First World to help anyone out there that may be considering them. They go under several names- slipnet, sirius, First World and recently Verado.
My original dialup account was through sirius and I stayed with First World after they bought out my local ISP. Sirius had normal ISP problems though they always seemed courteous and responsive. When I decided to switch to DSL, my criteria was free installation and a reasonable monthly charge. There were many providers offering deals similar or cheaper to First World, and I decided to stay with them due to my history with sirius. The sales guy pitched the free installation, never mentioned any inside wiring charge and free first month to get me to sign up.
The installation took about a month. Previously I had a second phone line for my dial up account and thought that would make it easier for the installation. After the installation I had a slow connection for a while though it seemed to be acceptable. During the course of the year the emailed me about the outages of the service which was good. The tech support seemed friendly enough and were able to answer basic questions.
Billing Problems- Sound Familiar? Here is where my horror story begins, sounds liek the other posts on the board and still hasn't ended. I had given sirius my credit card info for automatic billing every month and First World took over and at that point there was no reason to distrust them. About a month ago, in early April I noticed a $600 charge on my credit card. I found out it was from First World.NO INVOICE. NO EXPLANATION. JUST A BIG FAT CHARGE! So I call up their customer service billing dept. and this woman tells me that I was repsonsible for that unexplained, unauthorized charge. She was pretty rude and dismissive about my query. Finally she told me it was for inside wiring, installation and monthly billing (i had been charge for dialup instead of dsl over the last 10 months). She did agree to help me get back my rebate money through the Covad rebate. Though the story changed when I called again. One rep told me to call COVAD for my rebate. I told him that was ridiculous as the offer was from First World and usually one needs an invoice for a rebate. I aksed for the supervisor that left a message on my machine telling me that the rebate is no longer available.
It took the billing dept. 10 months to realize that they hadn't billed me the correct dsl charge, or installation fees. Due to my automatic billing I didn't realize that these guys weren't billing me the correct amount, since I was never sent an invoice. Since I was told that installation was free, I assumed I didn't have to worry about it. Doesn't one normally get billed before applying for a rebate? After running up a wall with the billing dept, I emailed the COO with my concern and offered to pay the charges that I owed (the difference in the dialup/dsl) and have the other charges removed. A manager called me in response and it seemed that she was desperately trying to find loopholes in the contract. I told her that I still had no invoices (after a month) for the unauthorized charges on my credit card. I finally got the papers after a 2nd email to the COO. Turns out that that the inside wiring is checked off as being authorized on their internal paperwork-nothing I signed.
At this point I AM really disgusted as I still have no resolution. This company doesn't really care about losing a good customer. I thought writing to the COO would make a difference as the company would want to stand by a promise that they made to a customer. The billing dept. told me to dispute the charge on my credit card which I am doing right now.I am considering legal action against the company and if anyone else is interested it could warrant a class action suit.
I thought I was an islotaed case with the billing error though reading the posts on the board it seems like it is a deliberate avoidance to rectify a problem by the company.
You will see the following on their website-
"On February 12, 2001, FirstWorld Communications changed its name to Verado. Verado is derived from the Latin words "veritas" and "verus" (truth and true) and our company's Colorado and Western heritage." DON'T BELIEVE IT! BE ASSURED THAT THEY DON'T STAND BY THEIR PROMISE FROM MY FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE!
SO BEWARE AND CHOOSE SOMEONE ELSE!
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Review by cnichols
member for 11.7 years, 34 visits, last login: 7.8 years ago
updated 11 years ago
- Rancho Cordova,Sacramento,CA
- $79 per month
- (24 month contract)
- about 35 days
- SBC
- CLEC party: Covad
- "Friendly tech support people (useless, but friendly)"
- "The worst customer service I have ever experienced."
- "Only subscribe here if you are not interested in reliable service and enjoy a run-arounds when things don't work."
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I ordered the service. Because of distance from switching station could only get 144\144 service. Took about 5 weeks to get the line installed.
During the install process the communication was terrible. I told the rep that if the phone company needed to access the phone box in the back yard I needed to know because my dog stays in the back yard while we are at work. Never did call and the luck of the draw put one of us home when they were there to work.
Had to call the tech support several times because information such as gateways, dns servers, wins servers, newsgroup servers and such were never documented or provided.
After installation everything worked pretty well for about three weeks, then problem started cropping up. For almost a month I was unable to access my webs without completly re-configuring a workstation to use dial-up connection, and as I am the webmaster for a youth football team, these problems reflected badly on my team and my web because it was not kept updated on a regular basis. For almost a week the line was completly dead.
Here is a log some of the problems along with the time-line of response.
FTP Service Unusable:
First Noticed 8-19-2000 Phone call to tech support 8-19-2000. Promised to look into problem. Opened service call ******
Phone Call in morning 8-20-2000. Tech to busy blaming local setup to help.
Phone call in Evening 8-20-2000. Tech seemed to listen. Said was going to forward the problem to senior support with high priority.
No contact from Firstworld until I called on the morning of 8-24-2000. Told to download several other FTP clients and try them. Downloaded absoluteFTP, FTP Voyager, CoffeeCup, DirectFTP and LapLinkFTP. Previously used clients: WSFTP and CuteFTP (recommended by firstworld tech support). Unable to connect to ftp.firstworld.net with any, but could connect to every other site in directory for each program with no problems.
Sent E-Mail message to ******** (account salesman) asking for assistance on 8-24-2000 at 10:51 a.m. No response.
Phone call to tech support on 8-24-2000 at 3:20 p.m. (no returned communications from firstworld). Spoke to ***. Stated request sitting in support que, offered no clue when I could expect resolution.
Phone call to Customer Service 8-24-2000 at 3:30 p.m. Stated no support supervisors available for consultation, but rep promised to call my home number today (8-24-2000) with an answer of when I could expect resolution of the problem.
4:18 PM 8/25/2000: Called tech support (********). Stated possible problem lay in connection going to denver server. No administrators avaialble, promised action Monday 8-28.
9-10-2000: Still no resolution, and could not get dialin to access ftp site. Called tech support again and spoke to ***. *** promised to call back that evening with a resolution. Did call back but stated resolution in progress and he would call the next day (Monday 9-11-2000) with final resolution. Gave both home and work number. No returned call as of Wedensday 9-13-2000.
11:40 AM 9/13/2000: Called tech support again. Spoke to *****. Stated record showed problem isolated to software issue at firstworld. Problem finally corrected 9/14/2000.
Connection Dead.
10:00 PM 8/25/2000: Internet connection went dead. Only power light and flashing NT1 lights on router. Called tech support 8:30 AM 8/26/2000. Promised call-back by tech support by 9:30 AM same day before family had to leave for football game. No call-back at all when family arrived home at 7:00 PM. Called tech support and opened support ticket *****. Promised priority action by senior tech support and advised to use local dial-in number Problem finally resolved 8-31-200 after I called customer service on 8-30-2000.
FTP and E-Mail Connection Problem:
7:41 PM 9/17/2000: Unable to send mail. When message sent from any firstworld mailbox delivery failure due to no transport being avaialble. FTP not connecting again. Called Tech Support spoke to ******. Case Number *******
Connection Speeds
(tester located at »/stest/0
4:58 PM 8/24/2000: ** Speed 120(down)/125(up) kbps **
5:10 PM 8/24/2000: ** Speed 132(down)/122(up) kbps **
11:23 AM 8/25/2000" ** Speed 120(down)/125(up) kbps **
11:45 AM 8/25/2000: ** Speed 120(down)/126(up) kbps **
1:14 PM 8/25/2000: ** Speed 120(down)/126(up) kbps **
5:00 PM 8/25/2000: ** Speed 119(down)/126(up) kbps **
7:47 PM 9/17/2000: ** Speed 116(down)/130(up) kbps **
This is a nightmare Freddy Kruger would be proud of. For the past few weeks I have had a weekly outage of the line. I called tech support, and they have adoped the old, "that's somebody else's problem" song and dance by blaming Covad for the problem. Two weeks ago when my connection went down they told me that Covad could be calling to setup an appointment to check the line. Well they never called, just showed up one day. I was in Vegas at Comdex, and the wife was at work, so of course they could not get to the phone box because my dog is in the back yard when nobody's home. The wife gave them a window of last Thursday and Friday, or Tuesday of this week. Last weekend my service went down again, and when I called I was told it was my fault because I was not home for Covad, and of course if I had a problem with that I needed to call Covad's customer support. I explained to the technician I was not Covad's customer, they were. I do not pay Covad...I pay firstworld and they contract with Covad...the upshot was that they will not be here until tomorrow 11-22-00, and I have had intermittent service at best. For the past three days the only way I can access my e-mail is by using Mailstart.com since Outlook will not connect, but of course it's not Firstworld's fault.
An update as of Jan 22: I did some screaming to the tech support people, and for the past couple of months I have good connection speed and the service has been reliable. This does not change all the problems I have had, but in the interest of fairness I need to state that the service has improved.
Update May 6: Enough is enough, and I ordered @home service this morning. Last week I had another outage, and in the process I found out that I am beyond the servicable distance (without installation of repeaters) for the installed line, and the fact that I have paid for the repeater (that was the justification for the high monthly fees) for almost a year, there are NO repeaters on my line. I am 900 yards beyond the maximum distance, and I don't know if it was Firstworld or Covad, but when the original line was ordered the distance was under-reported by 1,000 yards. Also Friday morning it became impossible to reliably access my firstworld-hosted sites due to access permissions, and here it is Sunday and they still don't have a clue what is going on, nor do they have any idea when the problem will be resolved.
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 Review by jmason
member for 12 years, 2678 visits, last login: a few hours ago
lodged 11.1 years ago
- Redwood City,San Mateo,CA
- $289 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 90 days
- SBC
- CLEC party: NorthPoint
- "When it's up, it works really well"
- "Lack technical expertise in both tech support & sys admin"
- "Avoid if possible"
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Originally a Sirius dial-up customer since '95, I decided to go with FirstWorld (who had acquired Sirius) when I was shopping for DSL. Prices were competitive: $289/mo for 1.5Mb SDSL via NorthPoint, routed /29 subnet.
Installation: They took my order and confirmed via e-mail in Dec 99; installation was completed in Mar 00. (Important note: They will simply not follow through on orders unless you constantly stay on them. I know this is a pattern, because I ordered a T1 through them for my office at the beginning of Jan 00; there was no action by the end of Feb 00. Upon investigation, I learned they had only just opened the order with PacBell for the loop in late Feb, nearly two months later. I cancelled the T1 order and went with another ISP who was able to get the service up inside of two weeks.)
Tech Support: In Jun 00, I started losing sync consistently, to the point where I could not pass data. It took them 3 months to coordinate with the CLEC and ILEC to finally get the problem resolved. Although not all the blame can be placed at their doorstep for this, FirstWorld's culpability was their inability to keep a decent history of everything they had done on the case: Every time I called them, it was like starting over completely from scratch. I was essentially going around in circles, with their running exactly the same tests over and over to no avail. I finally solved the problem myself by talking to the ILEC technician, discussing with him results from NorthPoint's various loop tests, and convincing him to change me to another pair in the F1 run of the loop.
Tech Support, Part II: They seem to have a number of people there whom we used to call "Qualified but Not Technical" in the software support biz. In other words, they provide a shoulder to cry on, but cannot actually do anything for you. Though, there was one shining star by the name of Eric who was technically competant and actually helpful. Were it not for him, I would definitely have been at my wits end with their tech support.
System and Network Management: Poor. Their core router for San Francisco will go down for days at a time before they can figure out what is wrong and repair it. Their DNS servers for the sirius.com domain are configured rather strangely (i.e., the serial in the SOA is actually different on each authoritative ns for the same zone!! I have no idea how they have it configured, as it is non-standard to the point of being wrong.)
Billing: Strange. Their billing cycle is inconsistent; I've received invoices at various times throughout the month. There is no specified due date on the invoice. Sometimes I will go for two months without an invoice, then receive one with charges for two months combined. I've never been charged late fees, though.
Future: They changed their name in Feb 01 to Verado to reflect the change in their business model away from the ISP business to dedicated hosting; their Form 10-K shows exponentially increasing losses (net losses of $4M in '97, $18M in '98, $100M in '99, $300M in '00). They are now outsourcing their dial-up from StarNetInc and their mail servers from CriticalPath. As available evidence would seem to suggest that they are moving away from the ISP space as their core business, and because of their lack of technical expertise, I would suggest you avoid them if possible.
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Review by (hidden by request)
(review was emailed from domain posgroup.com)
lodged 11.1 years ago
- Placentia,Orange,CA
 Business customer- Contract price not specified.
- ""When its on""
- ""I can never connect" "Waited the Monday morning until a couple minutes before noon before it would connect""
- ""If your never going to connect its great! If you want to get online you better have a backup plan""
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Regularly cant connect, the other day we didn't get online service until
almost 12 noon. UNRELIABLE!
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Review by jon_strabala
member for 11.2 years, 2 visits, last login: 11.2 years ago
lodged 11.2 years ago
- Costa Mesa,Orange,CA
- Business customer
- $450 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 90 days
- CLEC party: NorthPoint
- "none"
- "Total lack of customer support and any technical competance"
- "Avoid at all costs (they think tech support is the phone number to their legal voice mail)"
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Sold me a business service with a bad router (i.e. one Win/95/98/NT ftp connection
would completely starve all other ISP traffic). Replaced with a flowpoint 2200 and
that problem went away.
Previously Intelenet, bought by FirstWorld who subsequently demanded that I
frac my Class-C to 30 hosts from a full 256 block. Gee that was nice of them
considering I paid for the block for four years (same ISP at 2X market rates) and
have 164 publically accesable servers.
There Technical support was a) lazy trying to get my staff to read AIRN information
provide network details and basically do there job b) incompatent as they had no idea
what a hardware packet filter was and why it prevented there port scans. The bottom
line is they simply terminatd my contract. Stupid of them I hadn't called tech support
for three years and was paying $450 a month - this is their loss as I am free to get
a better provider and they are stuck with the dim bulbs who run there tech support
area.
I didn't have a bad experience with one individual but several, company culture is
"the customer is always wrong, don't listen to him". I provided network info 100%
as per there request and proved that there port scan was blocked but did they care
nope. The morons cited "my right" to terminate and fedex'd a termination letter.
Get this I had to help them by showing them the right legal section that they should
have cited (i.e. there right to terminate) so they could get it right the second time.
These people are serious incompetents and there SEC filings prove it!
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Review by jcadam
member for 11.3 years, 3 visits, last login: 10.3 years ago
lodged 11.3 years ago
- Colorado Springs,El Paso,CO
- $79 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 30 days
- CLEC party: Covad
- "Sales staff is very good, answered all of my questions well."
- "Install took twice as long as they told me it would, Billing dept. is totally inept, latency isn't as good as it should be."
- "Only buy if it's the cheapest thing around"
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My overall assessment of Firstworld is that the quality of the service meets expectations, but is never very impressive.
I signed up for Firstworld's "Telepath" 144/144 IDSL service, since ADSL or SDSL wasn't available to me. The salesman I talked to was very knowledgeable and answered all of my questions well. The install took way too long however, since the first phase of the installation involved my local phone company, US Worst. They failed to show up TWICE to perform their part of the install and then claimed that I wasn't present on the scheduled dates. After US WEST finally decided to do their part of the job and stop dragging their feet, Covad took over. This part of the installation went smoothly and took less than an hour. After the Covad install tech. left, all I had to do was set up my computer's net settings and I was off and running.
After using the service for a few months, I noticed that I was not getting billed. I thought nothing of it and forgot about it. Well, 6 months after the install, I got my credit card statement and noticed that Firstworld had charged me over $700!!!!
I called up cust. service and was told that I was charged for the install and equipment(for which rebate checks should be coming anytime....) and backcharges for 6 months of service. How come it took them 6 months to realize they weren't charging me? Completely incompetent...........
I use my IDSL mostly for gameplaying, websurfing, and occasional downloading. The latency with Firstworld is not as good as I was hoping for. My pings are typically in the 100-150ms range to the major multiplayer networks(Mplayer, MSN Zone, etc..) and to most Unreal Tournament servers. The best I have EVER seen was around 70ms. Dissapointing, when my contract is up in August '01 I intend to shop around for a better deal..........
The service basically works, but I am not really impressed with it. If you do go with Firstworld, stay on top of the billing dept. so you don't end up with an obscenely high charge to your credit card all at once.
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