Review by johnyfive9 Location: Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA Cost Contract price not specified. ? Frequently down, if you have problems after hours, you are SOL, high latency Not reliable, understaffed, insufficient customer support, immature

Pre Sales information: Install Co-ordination: Connection reliability: Tech Support: Services: Value for money:

(1)Not reliable.

Power.net has been responsible for too many outages at various times during the day and night. During the day the outages are more frequent. Outages range from a few minutes to 12 hours to days.

(2)Customer service.

Contacting customer service is laughable if you have a dark sense of humor. There is one guy who seems to be the only technical support person yet you cannot get hold of him by any means - phone or email, although power.net does not seem to tell you this. You have to discover this for yourself.... After 5-6pm weekdays, good luck getting hold of anyone at power.net. 24hour service is non-existant. Problems have persisted for days without _any_ explanation despite numerous attempts at making contact. You may have to drive over to Manhattan Beach, CA to get problems resolved.

(2)Slow.

Horribly slow. Ping times to the router can get up to 3 seconds. During the day latency is at its worst.

(3)Immature.

During one particular outage, Power.net referred customers over to GTE when they shouldn't have. Basically Power.net leases lines from GTE and GTE was experiencing problems. Power.net should not have referred all their customers having problems over to GTE. For Power.net's customers, responsibility is on Power.net, if Power.net has problems with GTE then lease from someone else. Pointing fingers is simply immature.

Also, Power.net seems very understaffed. I asked to talk to technical support so they said "Oh, Dirk can't talk to you but you can leave a voice mail". First of all why is there only one guy in technical support, second of all, why can I not talk to anyone about the problem? As a customer this is unacceptable.

Power.net used to be just slow. Currently they are not only slow but unreliable - outages are far too common.

In summary, Power.net does not provide adequate service. Power.net may be cheap but its service is even cheaper. I would like to say that Power.net will take you a step back in history when ISP's were terrible, but I don't think any ISP in history has been as bad as Power.net. Anyone who is happy with Power.net should try another ISP for a month so they can see what they're missing out on.

System Anon 2000-Jul-7 11:10 am facts Response from POWER.NET: We can only feel for the about 100 GTE customers that where affected. Internet withdrawal can be painfull. Please keep in mind that DSL is not a mature technology. The phone companies are still learning. Specifically, a DSL line is not a slow T1 line. If you want a cheap connection for your company then you need to use two DSL lines from different providers. Or a DSL line combined with a cable modem. We recommend that all the time and even help with a suitable Linux router setup that can use either connection to get to the Internet. 9 times out of ten a customer with a problem should call GTE first. Wirelevel problems constitute the majority of all issues. At least for us. GTE does try hard but I am not sure if their equipment gives them all the information that they need to be effective sometimes. They cannot look into packets which would have helped tremendously during our incident. The big event. We went months without problems. Until two weeks ago. I only wish there had been something wrong on our end. We would have been able to fix that a lot faster. Affected where about 100 GTE connected customers. Colocation, COVAD or T1 connected customers had no problem. After swapping out all equipment on our end a problem persisted for over a day. We spend that day trouble shooting with GTE with no success and finally decided that it is not our job to trouble shoot but to get people back online. GTE had installed a new interconnect between our networks a day earlier and the affected customers where switched to it. The problem immediately disappeared even though we used the same type of router with identical configuration. Hmm. I don't have an account on dslreports.com so this will appear as anonymous posting. My email address is cto@power.net 2000-Jul-7 11:10 am: · hey mods ·

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