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Speakeasy Welcomes WiFi network sharing
sedawkgrep writes "Speakeasy.net has recently published a policy concerning their subscribers. They're openly welcoming the sharing of subscribers bandwidth via WiFi as long as you don't violate the existing terms of service. Speakeasy has always had a very liberal and open policy with their users. Even though I wouldn't open my network via WiFi, it's refreshing to see a company who is taking a more open approach rather than restrictive when dealing with its customers." I've been a Speakeasy customer for a while now ('tho my move from Boston to Ann Arbor meant going from 768 to 144 *sigh*) and have always been impressed with them. Great step supporting WiFi as well.
I was previously hooked up via US West. It was exciting.
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
Not with DSL. You're on your own pipe until you reach their switching backplane. Then you hit their uplink. Speakeasy has good peering. I regulary max out the 768 kbps, and keep it that way for days at a time.
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
maybe I'll give a shit when they stop blocking port 80 on my dialup account. What the fuck? are they afraid i'll use up all their bandwidth if I run a server on my 56k modem?
I talked to a service tech for my local cable company, Mediacom, and he said that service was terrible on campus because college students sharing bandwidth was putting a big load on Mediacom's servers. How can this be? If you've got 1000 customers at 1.5mb each, it doesn't matter if each of them share bandwidth with 10 other computers, it's still a total of 1.5gb for the ISP. Bad service just means that the ISP wasn't equipped to serve out that much bandwidth in the 1st place.
Fight the power, sign up with Speakeasy ;-)
I've handled DSL installes for about a dozen of friends / family / businesses... from Pac Bell, the now Defunct flash com , verizon, cox (cable), at & t, and Speakeasy. The one provider I feel comfortable in always recomending is speakeasy.
I have found that the most troublesome area of DSL is getting the line delivered. But speakeasy was the easiest provider to get in touch with a human to help solve any issue that cames up. I've worked tech support for a rival company named after this planet were on. At our call center we cringed when wait times for our customers would shoot up to 40 minutes, which happened regularly. I have rarely had this experience with speakeasy.
When I have had to call and get someone on the phone they are competant and solve my issues fairly quickly.
This to me is worth the extra money that they may charge for the service. My only complaint for a while was the lack of online management tools for domain or email hosting like pac bell has. The ability to add, remove and purge email boxes without getting on the phone is a great feature.
I hope they can continue to improve their service like they have been and keep in mind that some people are willing to pay more for quality service and support.
Bandwidth costs are getting so cheap these days, its a miracle anyone's in business. "Good" IP T1s are under $400/mo without local loop, and even that's getting inexpensive. I've been quoted well under a grand per month for 3Mbps with local loop.
In fact, some of the vendors I've talked to say that they've been converting a lot of "business DSL" customers to full T1s, simply because of reliability and cost competitiveness.
Hundreds per month for 1.5/1.5 is pretty much about right for that bandwidth, and it may still technically be a bargain if it includes local loop. T1s may be a better bargain if all prices are pretty much equal, due to higher reliability.
It's a little difficult to evaluate the problem-solving capabilities of Speakeasy, because the actual frequency of problems is pretty low.
I moved to Speakeasy and a 144K iDSL line (I know, but it's all I could get at the time) from another ISP with a 128K ISDN line who had been acquired and the new parent then acquired, with definite drops in service with each new owner. I had spent 2 months without service (trying to get a new Toshiba router to work following the demise of my Webramp unit) being bounced between the ISP and Toshiba customer service. Neither one wanted the problem solved, they just wanted me to go away. So I did.
Over the past few years with Speakeasy I have had two problems, one was a telco problem and one was a speakeasy problem. In each case, they took complete control of the problem management, made sure I had access to logs of what was going on and who was expected to do what when, so I always knew what was going on. In one case it was resolved in a matter of hours, in the other it took a couple of days.
I have NEVER had to wait more than a few minutes to talk to a customer service person -- mind you, the times I have needed to do so have been few and far between.
They recently expanded, creating a new POP in the Chicago area (I had previously been served via a POP in the Seattle area). The migration was flawless (from my perspective). They gave all their customers plenty of notice as to what was going to happen and when, then carried it off without a hitch.
I now have additional options -- primarily cable -- that would be much faster and cheaper. I continue to stick with Speakeasy due to their willingness for me to tinker with my own servers, and the fact that for most email and web browsing, faster speeds are not usually much of a benefit. While there are certainly times when they would come in handy (large downloads), I find that probably half or more web sites manage their connection to the lowest common denominator, the 56K modem connection.
In my case, when I look at all the options, having the freedoms afforded me by virtue of being a Speakeasy customer still outweighs the relatively few times I am seriously bandwidth-constrained. On those occasions, I think about getting a cheap cable service just for downloads and web surfing. I'd still run my email through Speakeasy, as they do a very good job of deflecting spam.
I've been a Speakeasy customer for about 4 years now, carrying an IDSL line. Short of two incidents, I've never had any problems with service. The first incident was when they had Redback router problems. I can't remember the head honcho's name at the moment, but he was sending out status reports daily on the repairs. Turns out they had a backplane problem in the Redback, and a bad patch bay, and the combination of the two was very difficult to debug.
So while that was frusterating, at least we as customers knew what the hell was going on. Try getting that out of Bellsouth.net (my ADSL provider). But the *real* story of how good their customer support is this:
While I'm quite happy with Speakeasy, I really wanted to get another ADSL line (I host a small group of people as a non-profit project). Speakeasy isn't yet offering ADSL in my area, but Earthlink is, and with static IPs (Bellsouth does also, but no statics. Morons.) So my IDSL goes out (about the time Bellsouth has 7 line trucks on the street), so then I think "Well, it's a good time to switch". Bellsouth came out, put in a new phone line, Earthlink provisions it, the ADSL modem shows up, it gets installed, it sort of works. At this point, since I'm now really moving to ADSL, I don't worry much about the down IDSL.
People can connect to the system. Mostly. Mail works. Mostly. Well, I can't send mail. After much discussion with Earthlink, who lied to me saying "Oh yes, there are no blocked ports", it turns out that they block outbound SMTP. Annoying. But they claim there's no problem in the routing, in spite of the fact that 50% of people can't connect, 50% of my outbound pings don't, etc. Talking to tech support, I said "I need this routing fixed, and I need port 25 unblocked." Them: "We don't see a routing problem, and we can't unblock port 25." Me: "OK, and I can't use your service. Disconnect it NOW."
So they did, and I go back to Speakeasy, calling in a trouble ticket. I explain that the time the service went out, Bellsouth was had every line box up and down a 3 mile stretch hanging wide open. "Yea, sounds like a line problem. They prolly swapped lines with you and Grandma Jones. We're on it!", says they.
Next day, someone knocks on the door. It's a technician with a modem. "Dude, gotta new modem for you. We think yours is cooked." New modem is installed, it works! Yay! Everyone is back up, mail flows, Speakeasy makes me happy again.
Then I get the bill for $300. $150 modem, $150 install fee. Yikes! I always knew a modem replacement wouldn't be free, but $300? No warning? I call Speakeasy, complement them on great service, and say "But this $300 was a little surprising. I mean, couldn't have someone mentioned it?" So they break it up over 3 payments, make it a little easier. Then the girl says "Hey, I can credit you for some service, since you had down time. How long was your service out?" "Well, it went out two weeks ago, but I was switching to Earthlink (only because you good people don't offer ADSL), so I'd say I noticed a week ago." "Gotcha, 30 days. OK, well, that's about $96 credit there. We'll do that!". Yay! $200 for a new modem. But not the end of it...
So I get the Speakeasy service survey, and because I like Speakeasy, I actually honestly fill it out. Complete with the $300 story. I get a call from the lady in charge of customer service: "Our people screwed up and didn't follow the script. You should have been told that the tech was coming, and the costs involved. We're crediting your for the modem, and the remaining $56 on the service call." I love this woman. Maybe she'll marry me, and we can figure out how to get free service for life.
There were complaints that Speakeasy had bad customer service at one time. I know they've made very agressive efforts to improve. I can only say that in my experiences to the support center has been nothing but friendly, knowledgable people, who actually WILL do something about your problem. Unlike, oh say, Bellsouth, where IF you can find out who to talk to, generally don't know squat.
Some of my folks would still like ADSL on that server. IDSL serves them well enough, and ADSL wouldn't see a dramatic improvement in uplink speeds for them anyway. Once Speakeasy offers ADSL, I'll switch. Until then, I'll pay $96 a month (yea, it's high. That was another reason to move to ADSL), but it's reliable, I've got 3 static IPs, no blocked ports, I can share on my WiFi if I choose, and I get EXCELLENT customer service.
jcwren
terms of service
"You are ultimately responsible for any and all activity that originates from your Internet circuit regardless of your knowledge of such activity. This includes but is not limited to activity by other household members, friends and guests. This also applies to security breaches of your own system by others who launch attacks from your machine. It is absolutely imperative that everyone with an Internet connection take proper precautions to ensure the security of their machine."
I have a 1500/384 RADSL account from Speakeasy, and my download speed is the max of 160k/s. I think it's pretty good, considering TCP overhead.
:)
Also, if you were to pay for 384, the download speeds you'd get would be 40k/s. I know this because I used to have a 384k SDSL account from Speakeasy, before switching to RADSL.
In the US, populated urban areas have much more competition and thus lower rates on broadband. Some smaller cities (40-50K people) may have only ISDN or very limited DSL availability at $100+ per month.
Tokyo sounds like it'd be a good place for broadband: lots of people who want it, relatively small geographical area meaning that the providers' return on investment for infrastructure is very good.
By the way, if anyone wants to sign up for Speakeasy DLS, Sign up here
Amazing magic tricks
if you only pay for 384, what do you usually actually get?
:( :( :( ]
Well this can vary I think. I've had Speakeasy DSL at two locations. The first location I paid for 608/128 and got exactly that.
The second location I paid for 768/384, but they sent me a new modem. With the new modem I was getting 5mbit downloads!!! and 500k uploads.
Unfortunately, that new modem was REALLY flaky, so I put my original modem in, and with that got exactly 768/384k...
Of course, the reason I got the new modem was because they said my old one wouldn't work, so I was a little upset at this.
I got them to send me a replacement of the new modem, but it didn't work well either. So they took back both new modems and refunded the money I had paid for them, and let me keep using the old modem.
So despite the issue, my overall experience has been very positive with Speakeasy.
I've just moved again, and as soon as Covad has my street in it's database, I will be transferring my DSL here. [Although only 144k
Ender
Nothing to see here
You should be happy to pay a little extra per month for usenet over 1GB since you're obviously downloading warez, mp3s, and movies.
Actually, there are a few legit reasons for needing that much bandwidth. A few people have complained on the dslreports forum that they need the bandwidth to run local mirrors of some newsgroups. Some people seem to be running their own news servers. Others are archiving their favorite newsgroup for posterity. Either way, downloading all the posts in even one moderately busy group will put you over the 1Gb/month limit easily.
Also, looking at the alt.binary groups briefly, it seems like some of them may have legit (non-copyrighted) material. For example, it kind of looks like the alt.binaries.3d groups are where people post their own creations for others to critique. Likewise with the demoscene groups. The band Phish has a binary group. Perhaps people post bootlegged songs there (Phish actually encourages taping their shows, so this is still legit), or stuff like photos or videos they took of the band. All this stuff is perfectly legal, but can use up over 1Gb/month.
It was April 2000, when I first heard of Speakeasy. I had to move to Cali (bay area) for seven months with my wife, and while at it I wanted to give a try to this new "DSL" technology everyone was talking about.
Some ISP-shopping later, I settled with a 640k/160k RADSL Speakeasy+Covad solution, with modem rental, $60/mo.
First and foremost, when in september the price of my account type dropped from $60 to $50, they lowered the actual bill to match the new offer - and that's pretty unique.
Second, they wanted a full year of contract, but after I told them I had to go back in Italy (I'm italian) after only 7 months, they replied: "Ok, no problem: as long as you don't switch to our competitors, you can stay with us even two weeks, if you wish so". Pretty darn cool, if you ask me.
Last but not least, when I had to return in my native country, and I needed to arrange the return of the rented modem, they indulged in saying the shipping cost for the modem would have been way too high for them to care, and that I could have kept the modem "as a gift for having been their customer". I was speechless.
Right now, I'm connected to the 'Net thru a local, italian DSL provider, but the modem is still the dear old Speakeasy's Efficient SpeedStream (with a power adapter, you know, 110V/220V).
Can you name the provider I will look for if/when I will return in the US?
The one who provided me with a "human" experience. This "you can share your band, if this makes you happier" attitude isn't really new to me.
It depends on what tech you get. Speakeasy has grown a lot as a company in the past few years. It used to be that you'd wait on hold for 40 minutes and finally talk to someone who had a lot of expertise. Speakeasy initiated an effort to hire more tech support reps. There were a few bad apples who were absolutely infuriating to deal with. 90% of the Speakeasy support personnel that I've spoken to have been excellent and have been perfectly willing and able to schedule a conference call with Covad's techs and do a loop test, etc., to get to the bottom of any issues.
I think the bad apples are (fortunately) gone. My Speakeasy DSL has had minimal downtime, and now that the growing pains are over, Speakeasy is once again a joy to deal with on the phone.
Amazing magic tricks