do_not_use_psn
@popsite.net
|  You *will* regret choosing PSN.
When I got DSL, Northpoint was the only provider I could get. PSN.net was one of the two choices offered up by Northpoint's Web ordering procedure. Both were $40/month; the other had some unacceptable terms of service. So I checked here and found mixed reviews. Most ISPs in that price range had them. I took the chance.
I was a fool. Believe the horror stories here. If you think it's all typical Internet message-board ranting, and you'll have better luck, check out their report at the Phoenix Better Business Bureau. PSN.net is a terrible company.
Here's my experience with them.
May: Ordering and installation went fantastically. I was up and running in a couple of weeks. Ameritech, believe it or not, got my outside wiring done in a few days; Northpoint was out not long after that. The first inkling of trouble I had was the fact that the Northpoint installer spent over an hour on the phone trying to get PSN to set up a new customer. But it was up, speed was good, it had been painless, I was a happy geek with DSL. I decide I trust the service enough to start moving mail, etc. to my systems using it. I ask for a reverse lookup for my static IP. Jason R. says he does it. He's really nice and willing to help, but it never appears in their DNS. Still isn't there now, several months and requests later. Frustrating, but I can live without it.
June: OK, except for the sites that don't like my lack of reverse lookup.
July: Get back from the 4th of July holiday to find my service completely gone. Fortunately a friend can host me temporarily. (He's got service through Speakeasy, and has never had a problem.) It's out for weeks. I once spent over four hours on hold without hearing a human voice. I got through to tech support a couple of times; each time the useless surly twerp on the other end was always obviously convinced it was me or my firewall.
When I was finally frustrated enough to try and cancel my service, Sabrina in customer service, bless her, obviously felt terrible about it and convinced me to give them one more chance. She actually got up and went and found someone (Dave, I believe) who evidently knew what he was doing and could be bothered to check it out.
At that point, I was a fool again. Before I agreed to let her track Dave down to fix it, Sabrina said I should be able to cancel my service and get the balance of my year's payments back -- without even the $250 charge Tone had told me about when I placed the order, considering how much of my time as a customer I'd been down. I should have just taken her up on that. Instead, I decided to stick with PSN. It was going to be hard to switch ISPs. Northpoint told me I'd have to get PSN to release my line. Yeah, I'd be able to get through and have them agree to that, I thought. Hah. Anyway, it turned out that the other ISPs I called would only work with a fresh line -- who knew how long another install would take.
The next day it looked like the right decision. My line came back; Sabrina and Dave had come through. It turned out to be a configuration problem. Human error. Nothing was ever wrong with my line, someone had just munged my setup. Simple carelessness had cost me weeks of service, hours of listening to "Smooth jazz ... the Coyote, KYOT", and fruitless pleading with harried unsympathetic people throughout the company. But it was finally fixed, and I had no better alternative.
August: Uneventful. I'm cautiously optimistic.
September: Last week it goes out again. I'm down for a couple of days while they "replace a card in the router". OK. It happens. What ISP doesn't have better service from Cisco than that, though? This week, there's a "fibre cut" on Wednesday. All right, sure, whatever. It's still not fixed. I crash at my friend's again, virtually speaking.
By now, Covad is serving my location. I can get out. I call about canceling, talk to Michelle in billing. No, if I cancel, they won't give me back my account balance. Not even minus $250. There's a reason there's no contract to sign, I guess. Basically, they're keeping all my money and I'll get nothing and like it. Talk to a manager? Hold on a second. She dumps me into the office manager's voice mail. She's out of town for a week. Sure, of course -- I leave a grumpy message and call back. She's pissed now. They do give credits for service outages. But not for the big one in July -- too long ago. Never mind that no one mentioned credits at the time.
Well, all right, if there's no way I'm getting any money back, I guess I'll have to keep PSN for the duration of the contract, but I have her put a note in right now that I'm not renewing, for all the good that does me. I'm going to have to double-pay to get reliable DSL service. I can't believe this.
So. The connection is unreliable. You can't get through to these people. Most of them clearly don't give a damn about you, and you will suffer much before finding the few who do. They'll take your money, and once they have it, you may not get anything in return. They're bad enough that they have an unsatisfactory rating from the Phoenix Better Business Bureau. The Arizona Attorney General is even after them! I don't think businesses come much worse than that. I wish I'd dug enough to know all this before I ever called them. I hope this saves someone else the grief and frustration I've experienced. |
