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Covad On The Mend
ewhac writes "The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting that Covad, who filed for bankruptcy protection last year, is slowly regaining strength. With $246 million in cash, Covad claims it has enough to carry it to profitability. They've also struck a deal with AOL to provide high-speed connectivity to AOL customers. The battle isn't over, though, as Pacific Bell continues to undercut Covad's offerings. Covad is effectively Pacific Bell's only remaining competitor for DSL service. As a happy Covad customer through Speakeasy.net, I'm pleased I won't be forced into PacBell's or AT&T's hands any time soon."
I'm a UUNET (gasp Worldcom) customer who uses Covad for my telco. When I first heard about Covad filing Chapter 11, I immediately called UUNET/Worldcom to determine what to do if Covad were go out of business. Worldcom, essentially said I would be shit out of luck. So for the last 6 months or so, I've been a little on edge about whats happening with Covad, but now that I see Covad recovering, I'm happy.
And then Worldcom filed Chapter 11.. Luckily Covad supports more than just Worldcom in my area, unlike how Covad is the only telco that can provide me DSL.. Funny how Covad uses Verizon lines, yet Verizon can't qualify me for DSL and Covad can..
Oh well, I don't like Verizon anyway, Go Covad!
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
I was a completely happy customer with Speakeasy.net DSL in my old apartment. Until I moved...
:)
For some reason Speakeasy.net just couldn't figure out how to cancel my service. It took them nearly 5 months to figure it out and it cost me quite a bit of $$ in the meantime.
Overall, I was darn happy with the service. It never had connectivity problems.
The only suggestion I can make is: 1) Don't move. and 2) Don't cancel.
If you follow those you should be just fine
-brain
Being a customer of both Covad and Speakeasy, I have to say that I do like Covad. Speakeasy, on the other hand, is a whole different story. Maybe it's just me, but the problems I've had with them have been significant and costly.
It all started a year ago, when Covad filed for bankruptcy. At the time, I was on XO's network (having been grandfathered in, since I was a residential customer of Concentric, before they changed to XO and dropped residential offerings). I truly liked XO, but with Covad's Chap11 scare, I needed some sort of reliability, and XO couldn't give it to me. They had a fall-back plan for their business customers if Covad would kick the bucket, but we remaining residential customers were out of luck. Therefore, I began looking for a new ISP. Having heard good things about Speakeasy, it was a natural choice to switch.
This is where things started to get hairy. I went through the whole ISP switch process at Speakeasy, but somehow they neglected to complete my switch. My $90/mo 1.5mbps/386kbps line through Covad that I had with XO was switched over to Speakeasy, and they even started billing me for the extra IPs and domain hosting service I ordered. However, they didn't start billing me for what they intially told me was a $90/mo line, same as what I had with XO. (note: This is the first place I screwed up. I didn't get the 1.5/384 @ $90/mo offer in writing, since it was clearly listed on their website. This came back to haunt me later.)
After several months, I decided I didn't want to get charged a huge lump sum for back-charges, so I notified Speakeasy that they never completely provisioned my account. They were quite nice about it, and promptly finished the provisioning order. However, since August when I switched and October when I notified them about the billing problem, they replaced the 1.5/384 straight ADSL @ $90/mo offering with a 1.5/128 line-sharing RADSL @ $90/mo offering. Imagine my surprise, then, when I get my next bill and see not a $90*4 charge, but a $250*4 charge! All of a sudden, my $90/mo line had turned into a $250/mo line. Obviously this was unacceptable, and I spent the next two weeks getting passed around among the various customer service representatives at Speakeasy, all of whom promised to figure out the problem and solve it, but none of whom actually did. (note: Had I gotten the original offer in writing at the time of switch, they'd have had no choice but to give me the 1.5/384 line @ $90/mo like it was when I signed up. But I didn't. c'est la vie.)
After two weeks of bullshit and getting the run-around, I decided I would split the difference and convert up to 768 SDSL ($160/mo), if Speakeasy would reduce the $250/mo back charges to $90/mo. After another week of negotiating this deal, I finally got a useful rep, and was able to get my back charges reduced and the new line provisioned. (note: It took another several days to iron out this conversion, because first I was told my initial ADSL line, being a straight connection and not line-sharing, would be sufficient for SDSL. Then I was told it wouldn't, and I'd need to go through the whole order process again.)
In the end, I had to have Verizon and Covad both come out to run a new loop. Verizon was surprisingly prompt, arriving two days after I completed my order, and Covad, while scheduled for a week later, actually noticed that Verizon finished their work promptly and notified me that they would be out the very next day. Go Covad! At that point, I had my new loop, but I had to fight with Speakeasy for another week for them to get it provisioned and into their system, and give me back my previous IPs (easier to do that than it would be to change DNS records and wait 24 hours for them to fully propogate).
Moral of the story: When dealing with Speakeasy, get everything in writing. Document who you talk to and when, and what promises they made. If they don't keep those promises (even if it's something as trivial as them saying they'll call you in a day, and they don't), call them on it. And don't be lulled into thinking they're a good company simply because the reps act supportive. They'll lie to you through their teeth, making promises they never intend to keep.
Oh well, only a couple months left on this contract. Maybe I need to research another ISP switch. Sigh ...