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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.
Right now i am using my D-Link wireless router to access slashdot. I share my bandwidth from my Speakeasy DSL connection to all who come by. I am glad i can share my luck of living in range for dsl in area area where not many can get it.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
I have PacBell DSL (now SBC) and though the stories of their ever-increasing suckage are all true, they have one redeeming feature. Although my service is supposedly 128kbps up/384 down, in fact I consistently get 1.5 mbps download speed at any time of the day or night, even for multi-gigabyte downloads. Speakeasy seems to charge quite a bit extra for > 384k download speed; if you only pay for 384, what do you usually actually get? I wouldn't mind if it's 384k some of the time and faster at night, but I really like that high speed for large transfers.
I'm moving from Cox Cable because they recently instituted monthly transfer caps, and was all set to transfer to pac bell dsl when I read about how they're sending out spyware in the mail. I'm not about to commit for a year (or pay an extra $10/month) when they could very easily make that kind of software mandatory to use their service. Speakeasy.net was my next choice.
Anyone have any experience to share about speakeasy.net, specifically their customer service as well as how badly the bells abuse their monopoly when you sign up with an alternative dsl carrier? Also, I'm probably just not looking hard enough, but I didn't see any mention on their web site of the speeds provided with each tier of service. I'm looking at either the plain vanilla or sysadmin packages. Preferred rpmfind access would be great, but unless there's a significant speed increase (preferably in the upstream direction) over normal service it's not worth the extra $10/month. Any experience/information would be great.
Speaking of increased upstream bandwidth, I saw something interesting a while ago and I though I'd ask the slashdot community about it. At the end of the interview with the WinMX developers on slyck.com, someone (it's not clear whether it's the interviewer or interviewee) adds the comment:
Also I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that as more and more people move away from the crappy 128kbit upstream broadband connections onto the next generation 600kbit+ upstream broadband connections over the next year or two, the amount of available files and other resources will flourish on ALL P2P networks beyond all our wildest dreams.
600kbit+ upstream connections that people can actually afford? Huh? Has anyone heard anything about this anywhere else?
I like many of their policies, gaming servers, rpmfind server, and fileshack.
Too bad they have the all too common problem of only 128k upstream in my area (unless you want to spend too much on internet). Even Qwest in my old neighborhood had 256k on the base accouns, AT&T had 400k,and Time Warner was even faster.
But my big problem is a couple months ago they started a 1GB/month download quota for their newsgroups. You can buy more downloads, but it's more expensive than getting a newsgroups account from many newgroup providers, not to mention most places will provide full newsgroup access with your acocunt.
In general, DSL providers seem to be less worried about usage patterns than cable modem providers, probably because having separate lines from the DSL Access Multiplexer to each subscriber gives them a more reliable ability to throttle individual customers if necessary, as opposed to having a shared local loop in the case of cable modems.
Here in Tokyo I have adsl 8mb down/2up for about $50 US a month. They, and by they I mean probably 5 or 6 different companies, are now offering 12mb. They don't care if you share bandwidth or what. They are concerned with getting customers signed up and using their service. From what I hear, most people in the US aren't too happy with their high speed access. Maybe if companies worked more at customer service and less on pinching pennies they'd get more people opting for high speed access.
Unfortunately there is bad news on this front. If you try to get an ADSL over your POTS line you might end up having a line that goes out for hours switches to your bell's DSL service for days at a time and Speakeasy will give you no support with that problem. My bell said there was a problem with the Covad equipment and Speakeasy's techs said there was a problem with either the Covad or the bell equipment, and billing told me I couldn't cancel the billing on the disconnected line without paying the $300 disconnection fee. I ended up pulling out much hair by trying to talk to several billing people before going to my credit card's ombundsman. I used the helpful evidence from their tech support people, plus some collected from logs by my sysadmin at work, and e-mails from other Covad ISPs to create a report showing the problem and all my efforts at getting the problem fixed. My credit card company reversed the charges and I stopped getting hounded by their billing department after a month or so. But I had to spend way more than $300 of my time and on the report and on learning a lot more about my attorney general, consumer affairs, etc. In case I had needed to go further.
The really sad thing is that if they hadn't treated me so badly over $300 I would have given them great PR because I felt they really had tried their best to get the line working before deciding it wasn't anything they could fix technically. I didn't agree with them on not confronting the bell, which I was very willing to help them with, but I understood that if they didn't have enough customers with this problem the cost of getting it fixed with lawyers would be greater than whatever money they might make off a few years of providing DSL to those customers. I saw this as a Covad - Verizon problem that they were only secondary actors in, I felt bad for them. Then they wanted me to pay the $300 Covad was going to charge them for a lemon line and had billing people with a phone attitude that had me infuriated. At that point, I was ready to spend years and thousands of dollars disputing the bill. I shrugged when my bike was stolen, I was mildly annoyed by the cost of the dental work when I was attacked in an attempted mugging, I was actually annoyed when a family member that had volunteered to pick up a last paycheck cashed it. It is not easy to get me past annoyed to angry. Speakeasy managed it.
There are many nice DSL providers outside of the local bell and Speakeasy in most cities. I've had a good experience with a local one that supported WiFi before Speakeasy did. You would serve yourself well to find a good local ISP too.
I have been using Speakeasy iDSL for 9 months. My router, a flowpoint 144 model 132 died. The speakeasy rep said they only sold used units without warranty, he suggested eBay. I purchased a unit off eBay. When I called back, speakeasy said they did not support customer equipment. When I demanded that they provide information I needed to configure the router, I again got "we dont support customer equipment" So here I am, 5 months to go on a year contract and I cant use the service. What a crock.
This leaves us with two groups: the ones who "get it" and just leave their networks unprotected, knowing that it's a waste of time, and the ones who don't have the slightest clue, who put annoying security measures in which don't provide any real security benefit, and "feel safe", only to discover that they've been cracked fifteen times this weekend... so far.
The real problem, therefore, is that the government falls into the latter group and villifies the former, which basically boils down to government-mandated ignorance. I guess I should have expected no less from our President, though.... :-|
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
And I'll give the token thumbs down for Speakeasy. I started with them almost a year and a half ago, with a 1.5/384 ADSL line that was supposed to be $90/mo, but due to a three-month billing snafu and a major reworking of their ADSL offerings, by the time they actually started billing me (mind you, I was getting service the entire time), that $90/mo line was suddenly $250/mo, plus back charges. Needless to say, I had no written proof that the line should have been $90/mo, and they weren't going to budge, so we met in the middle -- they dropped the charges for that line, and I upgraded to the more expensive 768kbps SDSL.
Now, fast forward a year to this past November. During my entire time on the SDSL plan, I had been suffering near nightly DSL outages. The first 5 or 6 times this happened, I did call Speakeasy, but the outages were intermittent and short, so they could never track anything down. Also, the power button on my modem never worked -- the modem was always on (which is fine, but this will factor in shortly). Finally, last month, just after the one-year anniversary of my SDSL account and the expiring of my modem's warranty, Speakeasy suddenly decided that my modem was bad and needed to be replaced. (see the correlation with the power button above? The modem was bad since the day I got it, but it worked enough for me not to realize, and Speakeasy figured they'd string me along until I would have to pay for another modem ...)
To make a long story short, it took me several days and three customer support reps, but I finally got them to agree to give me the new modem for free since there was more than enough documentation on my account in the form of trouble tickets that prove the modem was bad at least as long ago as last February. So now my SDSL doesn't go down every other night, but it'll be interesting to see how they try to screw me next year ...