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Review by blockwo1 See Profile

  • Location: Redmond, King, WA, USA
  • Cost Contract price not specified.
PACIFIC CREST = OUT OF BUSINESS
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Services:
Value for money:

DISREGARD ALL BELOW. Pacific Crest/Dashmail went out of business long ago! I now use Comcast and am for the most part happy.

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First I should say that I manage a fair-sized server farm for a large corporation, and I used to run an ISP, so I am nitpicky.

I use Pacific Crest in their "DASHMAIL" incarnation. Basically the deal is, in larger apartment complexes, DASHMAIL owns the DSL rights - I can't get any other DSL provider here.

I ordered their standard service, was talked out of a 128k or higher committed rate by the salespeople I talked to. And a good thing. "Commitment" rates are much higher, and speedwise, I have been very satisfied. Tests at »www.computingcentral.com ··· test.asp regularly average around 1000 kbps (bits not bytes! - thats about 130 kbytes/sec - that's 2/3 of a T1). This is a great speed for $50/mo - as fast as one person, or a small (NAT) LAN, really needs. The slowest I have ever seen it, rarely, during high traffic hours, is around 600kbps. Still very acceptable.

I have had one outage, a couple hours long, in 6 months. Additionally, I gave up using their DNS servers after seeing them flake out several times (now I just point to Sprint's main DNS servers). Dunno about their web hosting, haven't used it.

New user support is kind of lacking. You get a xerox'd sheet with the dns, mail server, and subnetting information written in. No info on webhosting or news servers. Haven't used tech support.

Communication was poor. I ordered two IP addresses - got one. Reminded them of the order - they never fulfilled. But they didn't bill me either, and I never really got around to setting up that second machine, so, no biggie. Also, I did have to remind them twice to actually setup my email box.

Install was great. Their guy Josh drove up from Portland, showed up exactly when he said he would, everything worked hours later (he did the inside install first, then provisioned the line).

Overall rating: great network speed. Spotty on the service, typical of small company. Probably not the best choice for people who aren't into networking, given the lack of setup documentation. I am, overall, pleased.

member for 24.3 years, 96 visits, last login: 18 years ago
lodged 24.3 years ago