CylonRed
Premium,MVM
join:2000-07-06
Bloom County
 ·Speakeasy
| reply to ex_SE_user
Re: Speakeasy VS others
People will still defend them - I am tired of doing it since folks seem to want everything for virtually nothing.
It is dissapointed that help has left the forum but then I have never needed it either. SE is obvisouly courting business as other ISP's have done as that is virtually the only way to make any money.
I simply have nothing bad to say about my SE/Covad connection - I have been down for longer an a few minutes since Sept 11, 2001. I always get at least 80-90% of my rated download speed. It is virtually a business uptime for residential prices. I have not had to reboot my router to reconnect for at least 2 solid months and probably more like 3-4 months and don't plan on rebooting it anytime soon.
Remember - while AT&T and ILEC CAN sell DSL for a loss since they have other businesses to make money on (althought AT&T has had issues doing that as well) - SE relies on residenital DSL and business services. No cell phones/service, no residential phone (not VIOP as AT&T can sell both), no internet backbone business etc... They can't sell their DSL for less than it costs them to provide it unless they want to go out of business VERY fast. I am paying less for service now than when I switched over to SE over 6 years ago. The only way the ILECS can provide DSL for a lot less is to lose money on the service and when they desperate enough - the prices will rise.
While not for the casual residential service - it is great for those power residential service users. Even when I was a part of the America's Army beta team and had to download full installs at 900 to over a gig - I never needed anything faster than 1.5 meg download. I would get 1 gig in about 3-4 hours and do it over night.
Int he end - only each indiuvidual can determine if it is better to go with another service...
--
Brian
"Some people are like Slinkies...
Not really good for anything......
But they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down a flight of stairs." |
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TheDew
join:2007-03-31
Marietta, GA
| Horrible Speakeasy Experience
We experienced disconnects every month with Speakeasy which were killing our business. I spent hours on the phone with them and all together had 20 trouble tickets in the period of a year. The biggest problem seemed to lie with their trouble ticket process since they aren't the ones involved with repairs. The first challenge was to time the call with the intermittentcy so the rep on the phone could observe the problem - they would typically say they didn't see a problem or say our utilization was somewhat high and I could push the issue no further. However we eventually succeeded in timing our calls with the intermittentcies, so once having crossed that hurdle, Speakeasy would forward the ticket on to Covad. Then (almost invariably) if Covad didn't find anything with their cursory check, they would drop the issue. Finally, after 20 trouble tickets, months of intermitentcies and packet loss, and who knows how many hours on the phone, we were able to have our issue pushed through Speakeasy, on to Covad, and then on to Bellsouth who came out and repaired an improperly ground copper pairing - a 1 hour fix. Unbelievable...
Our connection was finally sound until less than a month later our connection went down again due to a region wide Speakeasy outage. At this point I had had enough and cancelled my service siting poor performance (obviously). You would think that would be the end of it, but no. They later charged my credit card on file a $1000.00 cancellation fee! I had never paid them by CC, but I had one on file from when I signed up. The charge was completely unauthorized. The whole experience has been a nightmare.
I filed a complaint with the BBB and the responder - Lawrence McBride - instead of trying to resolve or even listen to our issues immediately went into defensive mode deeming the $1000 charge legal and then went on to try to place the blame for our outage on us!
If you value your time, your business, or your sanity - whatever you do avoid Speakeasy. We now have our T1 with One Ring Networks - who although aren't perfect - when I call them I am dealing with the actual people that can fix the problem (they use a wireless line of site signal thus avoiding the local telco "last mile")
If you have had a similar experience with Speakeasy or other provider file a complaint with the BBB at www.bbb.org. It may at least help the next guy. |
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CylonRed
Premium,MVM
join:2000-07-06
Bloom County | There is no reason to spam 3 threads with the exact same post - do the review and then post in one thread... |
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TheDew
join:2007-03-31
Marietta, GA
edit:
March 31st, @05:02PM
| My feedback seemed relevant - sorry if that seemed like spamming. |
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