TheDew
join:2007-03-31
Marietta, GA
| reply to CylonRed
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. |
