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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
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'd gather that since running an httpd on dialup is essentially pointless to most people; and many users out there are windows users that have default installations of IIS, which are vulnerable to virus attacks, that they just blocked it to prevent port 80 attacks on their customers.
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
/me gets his box of sidewalk chalk out
:( )
(God I hope people rememebr warchalking
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
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 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.
bandwidth. If all customers of your bank were to close their accounts and withdraw all the money this Monday, your bank would collapse too. This is pretty normal. If you want guaranteed 1.5Mb/sec no matter what, you will soon discover that it costs a lot more than your cable subscription.
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.
I worry that as wifi access becomes more commonplace, hackers will use tools like airsnort and wepcrack to break into people's systems illegaly, and potentially could copy their important private data.
I would like to see wifi banned for the simple reason that most people are too stupid to set up the security correctly. They need to be protected from themselves.
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.
Lets see. If I allow passerbys to use my WiFi dsl connection, and then they use it to crack into remote boxes, who are the Feds going to come after?
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
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.
By the way, Speakeasy now has a promotion and is giving a free XBox, PSII, or Gamecube to new subscribers for certain plans.
To sign up for Speakeasy, click here to give me credit for the referral.
Amazing magic tricks
2 years, and weve had 3 downtimes. Once was a tunnel fire in baltimore that took down half the east coast, once the billing got screwed up(our fault) and the other time it was down for a whole 2 hours, and i think that was verizon. OH, and to fix the billing problem took 10 mins on hold, and once the new credit card was taken it was 30 seconds, literally. I cannot reccommend them enough.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
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."
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.
Look, I once had a great deal with PheonixDSL for 768/768 SDSL for $38/mo. Then they went out of business. Then I had Megapath 768/768 for $50 then they decided it was no longer worth it. So then I had Telocity SDSL 768/768 for $50. Until their back-end carrier (northpoint) went out of business. Then I had DirectvDSL ADSL 1.5/256 for $50/mo until, just the other day, they went out of business. Now my new $90/mo 1.5/384 speakeasy is on order. Know what? I will GLADLY PAY MORE if it means they can actually sustain the business model and keep the lines lit up. The sad thing is, I would have paid a bit more to ANY of them if they could have put forth a sustainable business model. I say GO SPEAKEASY! Charge what it really costs, make a buck, but STAY IN BUSINESS FOR ME!
Please remember that the Speakeasy account-holder is responsible for all activity originating from their DSL line, even if it is the result of other users on a shared wireless connection.
How could you know what everyone is doing on your connection if it was open? It seems that this point is a show-stopper.
Where I live I can get Roadrunner or Ameritech DSL. Roadrunner is $44.95 a month includes the modem rental, and I have a 3mbit / 384kbps connection (although officially it supposed to be 1.5mbit) and it never goes out, EVER. Ameritech charges $40 for 768kbps/128kbps plus you need the modem rental and installation of the DSL line can caust $400 and take a month.
I used to have verizon dsl in North NJ. They couldn't be easier to get dsl from. I called and a week later my self install kit arrived. On the turn on date I hooked it up and off I went. It was moron proof. While it was only 640/128 it only went down once in the year in a half I had it. :-)
When I switched to cable they gave me 2 months free just to try to keep me and even offered to lower the price $10 a month to match my $39 a month cable price. In the end I switched to cable though. Nothing beats 10mb/1mb. Because of my particular cable moden I'm limited to 600KB but my upload is around 90KB. Not bad for $39 a month.
More OT its nice to see an ISP who lets you share your bandwidth. It's too bad they all still limit uploading which is really holding back the internet. Only when upload speed matchs download speeds will we really even be ready to move on from the "web consumer model" that exists today. Unfortunately Big Media and Big Business only wants us to surf the WWW. I don't see this changing anytime soon. In fact things are more locked down and filtered then they ever were before.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Hey man, cancel your speakeasy and go with MSN or something. You're going to put them out of business ;)
What are you, a phone company shill? This is packet data, to quote Dilbert. 11 Mbps is the raw data rate. 7 Mbps is an ideal real throughput after overhead. 4 Mbps is a realistic speed for a moderately used network using consumer gear.
In any case, though, users are bursty. If everyone wants to download video at the same time, bzzt, failure. Email, Web pages, etc., are not timebound for each packet and aren't simultaneous activities.
I've been using 10 Kbps GSM on the road the last couple of weeks, and for email, it rocks (versus expensive hotel phone calls and other options). It's all about what you need to do when and how fast.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
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.
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.
I'm using Cox cable and I've heard nothing about these caps. Care to share your information?
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 ...
Local loop is the portion of a T1 carried between the carrier and your building, traditionally handled by the local phone company. Often referred to as last mile.
Its usually billed seperately to differentiate the cost of what you're actually buying and what it takes to get it to you. I think it matters in some accounting, and its kind of like saying "2.99 plus shipping and handling." You sometimes get quoted a price without the local loop, which can create a low price perception.
But these guys as many will find oun places like Broadband Reports are, suffice it to say, quite possibly the best ISP in the USA (or at least in the top ten), and considering that Speakeasy Cafe (RIP!) started by just selling peanut butter sandwiches to its cybercafe customers, that's one hell of a comeup. The only thing I regret is that, despite their almost exclusive use of Linux in their shop (a tech tells me they have one W2K box that they use for people who need Frontpage extensions, but other than that it's wall to wall Linux), they don't "officially" support it. They still give you pointers though.
This sig no verb.
Of course, YMMV.
I moved into a new apartment recently, and before I did anything I checked out DSL. Speakeasy.net may not have been the cheapest option, but they provided multiple statics and no real restrictions on use (a one gb news cap gratis, no running authoritative dns servers, etc, read the link.)
When I called them up before I had my phone line installed, I asked them the money question, and the answer made me go with them.
THEY ARE LINUX FRIENDLY.
I've been satisfied with their service, which I've had for the past four months. As far as dealing with the baby bells: the only bad thing is that you have to stick with one for basic phone service. As long as you don't dial much and don't tack on extra "services", it's cheap (around $13-16 a month). Anti-Tech.. err.. SBC hasn't given me any grief over it. And the speeds are fast and fairly reliable.
I have had no problems. I have no complaints. I mean, 1.5/384 and clueful tech support. What's not to like?
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
The cost of IPs
For a small ISP, each IP address costs no more than 67 cents per year. For a larger ISP, each IP costs as little as 7 cents per year.
Divide by 12 to compare to monthly pricing.
And how many let you configure the reverse DNS?
Feel raped yet?
THEY ARE LINUX FRIENDLY.
What does this mean? Does it mean that they officially permit gnu/linux machines on their network or that they actually provide tech support for gnu/linux users?
I mean, 1.5/384 [...]
Which package is this? How much are you paying for it?
I've been with the Speakeasy since 1996. I started out with a simple email account, moved up to a dial up account, moved my business' web site over to them, then got 768/384 DSL (turned out to be 768/768! Only paid for the 768/384 though) and had the DSL for about two and a half years. Soaring student loan payments forced me over to AT&T for my broadband connection, but I still keep my @speakeasy.org email because I love the company. Their tech support has always been top notch and they never got snotty when I said I was on a Mac. Major points there!
My actual first internet experience was at the little internet café that could. Bummer it burned down. They are a great company and do a lot to support social and cultural causes around the Seattle area.
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