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wallacc
@speedfactory.net
| Speedfactory ain't so bad
Maby I'm out of line here, and baring business customers, I think speedfactory has done a wonderful job over the last 5 year (that I have had them) and I liken them to the strugle between the little guy and walmart (ie bellsouth).. They do the best they can to keep their margins inline as well as compete with the supergiant (bellsouth). They have always given me better person to person service than any big customer could, and have kept prices good for the duration, and at one point in time I was 3+ months behind and they did not disconnect me. I'm sure this is somewhat eyeopening to them but all in all, it's just internet, and we really don't know what happened exactly, just a lot of speculation. I'll give them this thing that happened, and if it happens over and over, then there will be grounds for steaming mad, but at this point, it's a small ISP that had a problem and at the end of the day they are going to care more about their customers then the big guy, this from past experience. As far as the whole contact thing and acknolodgement of the problem thing, like I said, we really don't know for sure what went on, hardware problem, billing issue with their provider, or planning/upgrade/migration issue, but I'm sure there are political issues within with a company that already has a hard time competing (according to their quarterly statment on finance.yahoo.com), you guys do what you want, and bash them, and switch to giants and strangers and I will stick with these guys and see if they give me another 5 years of excelent service.. | |
billmax
join:2006-05-05
Roswell, GA | Just the contrary - I hope they learn from their (many) mistakes and stay in business even if I'm not a customer. So be it if it takes a seeming "bashing" to get the points across so that they become the company they used to be. | |
just thefax
@charter.com
| reply to wallacc
No one is immune to an outage. I have had comcast, charter, bellsouth, and northpoint. They have all had outages and they each learn from them. The point here is commincation and Speedfactory should learn that commincation is so important. Luckly we still had control of our DNS and was able to redirect our site. We will not bail out on speedfactory but we will maintain a backup site. But still is the world was perfect what would we do?
I'm glad you are back online and so are a lot of folks out there. | |
ByeSFHelloAtNex
@atlanticnexus.net
| reply to wallacc
I guess you are a little more forgiving than most of us on this board. Aside from their billing fiasco about a year ago, I would agree that they have done an excellent job over the last five years. Things went down hill after the NP acquisition to an intolerable low on Friday. Over the past 5 years, I have paid them over $3000, and based on the fact that I pay a little more, I expect a slightly better than average response to paying customers rather than a total lack of communication. Between Friday morning (their phones reportedly stopped working Thursday night) and mid-day on Monday they could not legitimately communicate with their customers whatsoever. Whether the problem was technical or accounting, nothing should ever take that long to resolve. It's residential service, so the primary time it gets used is on weekends and evenings. They couldn't deal with a Friday "outage" whatsoever. To use your words, "it's only Internet", so ordinarily it's not a big deal, but I had some work to do with a large customer Friday night from home, and it caused me major headaches and made me look incompetent. After seeing their SEC filings, it's clear that even if they do care, it would take a near miracle to restore them. I saw very little if any "bashing" here. For the most part, it looks like a lot of frustrated customers reporting what they saw, what they experienced, how they were treated, and acknowledged what information was rumor. I don't call that bashing. Good luck. I honestly hope it works for you and Speed Factory employees...I really do. I'm just not willing to give them another chance after the way this was handled. | |
tg3650
Premium
join:2004-07-05
Flowery Branch, GA
| reply to wallacc
said by wallacc :
you guys do what you want, and bash them, and switch to giants and strangers and I will stick with these guys and see if they give me another 5 years of excelent service..
I think at this point they're doing the best they can (with the free month of service to affected customers, etc.). However, I switched to another provider during the several days of silence. I might not have dropped them if there had been something definitive emerge Friday or over the weekend (other than some truly bizarre statements from whoever was posting via hatesville.com).
I was with them for several years and didn't have any plans to leave. In the future I might consider coming back if my new provider fails in some way. | |
wallacc
@speedfactory.net
| reply to wallacc
Yes, I'm pretty forgiving.. I am hoping for the best as personally I have never had a bad experience with them other than the fact I wish they'd get an online way to change your billing info so I don't have to call them every time I change my CC.. But other than that, they beat Charter hands down ( I was experienceing an outage every month and talked to some nobody in a call center who told me they were sorry and they would do better, here's your free 5 dollar credit.. ) Never heard any excuses from SP and even now, no excuses.. Just an outage and now they are back up.. Still as far as I know no "Offical" comment from the company.. | |
Ataru
join:2008-04-13
Smyrna, GA
 ·Atlantic Nexus
| In the end, for me it is really coming down to realizing (as a direct result of SF's handling of this situation) that there were other, better options out there. I believe it is impossible to reach SF sales at 2 AM on a Sunday morning, as I did with AtNex, for starters. I feel positive that SF is still a quantum leap above Charter and the other horrible corporate options even after this disaster, for the record, and if AtNex hadn't been there when I called, I might still be at SF.
Incidentally, I would bet that this isn't "just internet" to folks who have had their business livelihoods damaged by this situation, and they are at the least right to expect a full explanation about exactly what happened before they are asked to believe that this won't be a repeat occurrence. | |
da3dAlus
join:2002-12-18
Duluth, GA
·Speed Factory
| reply to wallacc
I may be a "simple" residential customer to them, but my pipeline to the internet is my life-blood. My wife and I are of a different generation, those who graduated from college with a 24/7 connection to the internet. Everything we do seems to revolve around being able to communicate with people via the internet. To have that ripped away without explanation, especially as a paying customer, is not what I would consider forgiveable.
The other point I'd like to make is that up until about 8 months ago, I was working from home. I'm a consultant/programmer, and my client was in NYC. I was able to work remotely for over 3 years, from the comfort of my own home. Yes I had outages during that time, but every one of them was a result of BellSouth equipment failures/issues, not SF's fault. I never took that out on SF, because they were always prompt in identifying and explaining the situation. If I were still working remotely, I would've lost 2 full business days' of work, and would've been even more irate at the lack of communication over this issue. And that is one of the reasons why I can no longer give SF benefit of the doubt, because I no longer TRUST them, plain and simple.
Thank you SF, for 5 years of service. I do appreciate your technicians, but your management leaves much to be desired. | |
Orsino
join:2008-04-12
| reply to wallacc
Up until Friday I would have agreed that their service was great.
That they disappeared for three days along with my Internet connectivity is inexcusable. I believe that they have proven that they're incapable of handling the next major outage, so I won't be around to wait for it.
I have to suspect that NextPhase's having cut most or all staff in the Atlanta area, along with the heavily-rumored money troubles, caused the outage. That it wasn't resolved until the next business day is another strong hint that the real trouble wasn't technical--or if it was, that response won't magically be better the next time.
Most of all, I hate that my ISP hid from me. Had anyone cared sufficiently, they could have had DNS redirected to some cheap hosting that could have given customers some official status--but no, we had to rely on rumor and anonymous postings on this forum, while for all we knew, the executives were hopping a plane to another country. Was the problem entirely financial? If so, SF took a huge gamble in trying to cover it up until it became three days of downtime, with no attempt to warn us. Heck, if they'd said "expect us to be down through the weekend," I'm lazy enough that I probably would have stuck with them.
A free month of service is a nice way to make amends to their customers; it simply doesn't make up for the aggravation I felt at having been abandoned. | |
staijo
join:2002-01-09
Roswell, GA
 ·Charter Pipeline
| reply to wallacc
I loved Speed Factory. And I feel sorry that they have done so poorly on this outage.
But I needed internet over the weekend, I had no clue when, if ever they were comming back. So I switched on Saturday and it was a pain but I got it done.
If I had better information Friday night, could I have waited? Probably. Did I have any info? No.
I do feel sorry for them, but they did it to themselves.
A lot of the SF business is people that need(or want) static ip addresses. That means they need 7/24 service to those addresses. I think this outage will hurt SF more than anyone knows, especially because they are already on the brink... | |
invalidname
join:2000-12-24
Marietta, GA
edit:
April 15th, @09:17AM
| I do feel sorry for them, but they did it to themselves. Exactly. Just doing any of the following would have convinced me they weren't going out of business:
•Redirecting the incoming web requests to a static server, outside of SF's network, with a "here's what's going on" message
•Having the ability to take calls when the network is down (which, face it, is when you're going to get the most calls)
•Staffing the office with one person all weekend to explain to passers-by what was going on, instead of taping up a simple note and heading for the hills
•E-mailing a status update to customers who have known, non-SF contact e-mail addresses (GMail, etc.)
•Posting to DSL Reports forums from an authenticated user account rather than an anonymous one (did we ever find out if "speedfactory" @hatesville.com was a prankster who made lucky guesses or actually an SF peson?)
That they didn't think to take any of these steps leaves me little reason to think they can handle the next outage. Remember, some forum posters claimed was caused by non-payment of bills... which if true means you can count on more problems down the road. | |
sf_customer
@speedfactory.net | reply to wallacc
ditto. | |
XSpeedFactory
@turner.com
| reply to wallacc
I don't know who Speedfactory was. However, it would not surprise me at all if it was someone from corporate. It seems that any future (however long that is?) tech support for SF will be moved to NJ.
But because all the servers are in Atlanta they will only be able to remote/vpn into the servers. Unless they keep someone on in Atlanta as a contractor, they won't be able to acess the servers/routers in the event there is a real emergency.
I also want to explain my conclusions a little more. First, the suppose router issue did not seem to affect authentication, ip routing, or dns. There are lots of routers that make up the internet, if it not SF routers its the upstream providers. Since, SF network seemed accessible...then hmmm. Second, as far as communication goes. All SF voice lines sit on bonded T1s, the fax numbers are analog, they are totally seperate from the OC3s that dsl rides on...hmmmm again. | |
lyramisu
join:2007-06-30
Atlanta, GA
·Atlantic Nexus
·Speed Factory
| reply to wallacc
Frankly, it is that bad. This isn't the first catastrophe they have had regarding some kind of failure followed by no communication. Last year, a bunch of people didn't get billed for months because Speed Factory's billing server failed and they didn't have any kind of workable backup. A bunch of us who were on auto-pay didn't get any notification that there was a problem, and then we got $300 and $400 bills with the expectation that they be paid at once. There was no explanation of the charges and no communication whatsoever about making arrangements to pay. When I called to talk to a rep, the rep acted like losing people's billing information, not having it backed up, not telling anyone, and expecting hundreds of dollars in payment was just the most reasonable thing in the world. Then, after I had made arrangements to pay in installments, they started charging me late fees and debited money from my bank account without my permission.
In other words, Speed Factory had ample, recent warning that a massive failure can and would happen to them, and they did absolutely nothing to put any kind of crisis plan into place. Do you really think this failure will make a difference? | |
not_a_basher
@myvzw.com
| reply to wallacc
I have seen very little "bashing" of Speed Factory, if any. I left because I needed my service back up, and in the total absence of communication from Speed Factory, I could only conclude that they would not be back. I contacted a provider at 6:45 am Monday morning and was up and running at 7:30 am.
If Speed Factory had simply let their customers know what was going on we would have stayed. Unlike Speed Factory, I have backups. I have POTS backup for my VOIP phones (which went down with Speed Factory) with failover already configured and automatically taking effect. I got all of my calls during this outage, even though my VOIP was down just like theirs! Since Asterisk handles all of my calls, I didn't have to do anything but answer the phone. (Asterisk is FREE to anyone wishing to download it).
I also have high speed wireless with Verizon distributed over a Cradlepoint 802.11g router.
And this is just the backup scenario for my residence. It is expensive, but necessary for me to have.
Speed Factory could have had failover for their phone system for very little cost - no cost if they failed over to existing phones. POTS failover is an industry norm for mission critical phone lines.
I can think of any number of ways we could have been advised of the problem. Many of them would have been free, or nearly free, if money is their problem.
In my cancellation email to Speed Factory I expressed my regret at leaving, and thanked the employees for many years of good service. I also pointed out that I believed management had failed miserably at what most of us in business know to be fundamental crisis management.
It's okay to have a (rare) outage, even if it goes on a little long - but it is never okay to treat your customers like mushrooms (keeping them in the dark and feeding them s**t), even for a moment.
Personally, I'd love to see Speed Factory become what it once was. While i do not know if I could rely on them as my primary provider any time soon, I might include them in my backup options.
These are the facts. This is simply analysis of my experience. I am not name calling, and while I have pointed out some deficits on their part, I do not consider it "bashing". Hopefully there are people at Next Phase having this same sort of "after action debriefing". I have supported Speed Factory in the past, and I will continue to have an interest in seeing them succeed and prosper. But they will have to earn my trust back before I will use them again. This is a management issue, the guys in the trenches are not at fault. | |
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