Speakeasy screwed us big-time
Graham Freeman
Background: Since 2003, a client's primary internet connection for their
Davis office has been a $99/mo 1.5Mb/768Kb ADSL line from Speakeasy with
MCI as the CLEC. We would've gone with Sonic.net, but they didn't serve
LATA 3 (including Davis) at the time.
So, at about 18:20 (6:20PM) on Wednesday 3 May '06 (yesterday) I started
getting email notifications from my monitoring system letting me know that
a client's DSL line was no longer responding to pings. This client has a
flaky DSL bridge that sometimes locks up, and they know to power-cycle it
when this happens, so I left it alone while I wrapped up work, ate, and
went to a movie with my SO. At about 2200 (10PM), the line was still not
responding, so I went over to the client's office to check it out.
Power-cycled the DSL bridge - no joy. Power-cycled the m0n0wall
router/firewall - no joy. Double-checked cables & settings - everything's
right. Plugged my laptop into the DSL bridge and configured it for one of
our static IPs - can't even ping the gateway.
So, I called Speakeasy's business support, and waited on hold for ~20
minutes. It turns out that they summarily canceled our DSL service.
Why? Because MCI doesn't want to serve Davis anymore, and Covad
(Speakeasy's alternative in such cases) doesn't serve Davis either. So,
Speakeasy just canceled the service without notice. The rep I spoke to
was just as incredulous as I was - it sounds like somebody on their end
screwed up big time and just neglected to inform us via any means that our
service would be disconnected. The first hint that I had anything was
wrong was at 17:26 (5:26PM) on Wednesday - about an hour before the DSL
line went dead - when I received an email from Speakeasy about my new
dial-up service. (I didn't order any dial-up service.) I guess that's
our consolation prize - we get to try to run email + web browsing +
client/vendor file transfer for 45 people on a 53K dialup line.
I'm really, really pissed. I knew Speakeasy wasn't as good as they
claimed, but I had no idea that they would screw me over like this. I
will most definitely never give them a chance to screw me over again.
Dunno exactly what MCI's role was in this, but screw them too - they took
2 business days to fix a total service outage last year, so this is
definitely not the first time they've left us high and dry.
Sonic.net, you have a new business DSL order. Please process it as soon
as you possibly can!
Graham
rather angry at Speakeasy and MCI
very, very glad Sonic.net started serving LATA 3
Kevin McMurtrie
totally dead every time it was used continuously. Downloading anything
larger than 30MB was impossible. I did all the testing that their tech
support asked me to do. After one of their techs fabricated some wild
stories about how modems worked, he concluded that I was over-utilizing
the line. All later tech support calls would only tell me that I had to
buy traffic shaping hardware or put up with the outages. They refused
to escalate to a better technician or give me the password to my own
modem even when I called to cancel. After I quoted their response on
DSLReports, one of them called me to apologize and actually asked me to
remove my posting. The best part was that they said the outages were
completely normal. How's that for quality service?