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Review by ShadowDraken 
member for 10.6 years, 18 visits, last login: 8.7 years ago
lodged 9 years ago
 Guymon,Texas,OK
 $49 per month- (12 month contract)
 Panhandle Telephone Co.- CLEC party: Panhandle Telephone Co.
 "No extra charge for the first static IP address" "Tech support barely knows how to keep their equipment running" "PTSI is an abusive monopoly. They are expensive, and have no competition, so don't care that they have no service or quality."
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I am on a claimed 768/256 plan, I can't complain about my downstream, as I get pretty close to the 768, but I'm getting less than half of my 256 upstream.
Tech support is grouchy and unhelpful almost all the time. They don't know answers to basic network questions/suggestions (I am A+ certified, and currently employed as a network admin), they don't know what most features/functions are, and they're generally unwilling to help fix problems, trying to pass off the problem as being user error instead. A good example here, is just a few months ago during peak hours, I would get less than 28.8 dialup speed. I called and complained, and they insisted it was the websites I was visiting. A week later they had their system down for 48 hours (that's right folks, no internet for ANY DSL users for TWO DAYS with NO WARNING TO USERS) fixing an undisclosed problem. Of course, the peak hour clog went away at the same time. Hardly coincidence.
Ordering and installation went smoothly, and as mentioned by a previous reviewer, a partial first month billing will be added to the first full month.
The home equipment I received was a dirt cheap and low quality external ADSL modem. PTSI decided to stop using 3Com a couple years ago, presumably because they weren't selling enough replacements (they didnt' break down often enough I guess).
Normally, you get a dynamic IP, but if you ask for static, they give you the first at no charge. This is actually pretty nice, as most ISPs either don't offer static, or charge for it.
Cox here was just bought out by Allegience Telcom. This summer they are adding Cable iNet service. If you can wait, I suggest doing so. For the same price as my 768/256, you get 3m/256 instead, add TV on top of that, and switch your phone service over to GloPhone ( »www.glophone.com/ ) and you'll pay half the price for twice the phone service and 6 times the iNet service, unfortunately it's about half as many TV channels as PTSI's DiTV service, but it's worth the savings, and it's worth sticking it to PTSI so maybe a little competition will clean them up!!
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Review by
(review was emailed in)
lodged 13.7 years ago
- undisclosed location
- Contract price not specified.
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I ordered the basic residential plan 384k/128k for $40.95 per month with free installation and equipment. The upfront sales information was correct but somewhat incomplete. While there was NO installation charge and everything turned out to be correct, the first bill I got for the service was a lot higher than I expected. It turned out that I was installed in the middle of the month and was not billed for the service until the next month and the following month was billed in advance. That made the first month's bill almost $70 instead of the $41 that I was expecting. The second bill was for the $41 plus taxes. As I said, it was not incorrect just surprising.
The company also takes the strange tact of actually understating the claims for it service. It advertises the service as being 5 times faster than dialup while the download speeds I have achieved are at least 10 times faster than my 56k downloads were previously.
The ordering and install process were fine except it seemed to take a long time to get scheduled for an install. I was told that they were giving priority to high usage dialup customers first and I was only a moderate user. The whole process still only took about 30 days however. There was no coordination to the process as PTSI handled the entire process and sent two people to do the install, one for the computer and one for the line.
At first I was having some problems with the internal modem showing some disconnects and lost packets but later the card was moved to a different slot in the computer and the problems went away. Since that time, I have had a rock solid connection. It took the tech support people some time to figure out the problem but as this was a new service for them, I'll cut them a little slack.
The Internet is a much more enjoyable experience now with the increased speed and I have not found very many providers that come close to their pricing of $41 that includes everything. I do wish that they would do the 1.5Mb plan for 49.95 like the Bell companies do however.
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