[BBLISA] opinions on towerstream

[Tabor J. Wells]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 09:10:34PM -0500,
Alex <xela at MIT.EDU> is thought to have said:

> We're considering going with towerstream for a second ISP, and 
> I was wondering whether anyone here has experience with them?
> I assume the technology is prone to some degradation in foul
> weather; I'm more wondering whether they have reliability 
> issues, whether their customer service has a clue, if they know
> how to set up BGP correctly, etc.

Well...

I'd recommend them as a backup only if your primary circuit went down and
not as a load balancing situation. I suppose it depends in part on which 
of their towers you're pointing at but when we were a customer we had all 
kinds of problems with the Woburn tower.

I lost count of the number of times I filed for SLA credits -- and I could
have filed more. They often 'rebooted the tower' equipment in the
middle of the day with no prior notice and they have no pro-active or
reactive customer event notification process. Or rather they did but rarely
used it -- because occasionally they actually sent email about an event. 

Many times I knew about a problem before they did and made them aware of it.

They regularly had problems with their L3/Genuity upstream connection. I
don't know if it was too small a pipe for the bandwidth they pushed or what
but I often saw congestion there. In fact a friend of mine just yesterday
was reporting the exact same behavior where he was going through TS's
network.

While they claim that their service is not affected by weather, I had two
weather-related outages. Both during heavy rain or sleet falls.

Tech support once refused to open a ticket for me on an outage I was
experiencing telling me that anything less than a 10 minute outage didn't
count in their eyes (even though they offered a 99.99% availability SLA). I
had to explain to their then VP of Customer Service what 99.99% availability
actually meant but of course since I didn't have a ticket number I could
never claim a SLA credit for that event. They also remarked to me more than
once that I shouldn't care about outages that happened outside of office
hours because I didn't have staff in the office affected by the outage. They
didn't seem to understand that I rather preferred to have my office mail and
dns servers available 24x7.

Oh and Tech support also once swore at me and hung up on a 2:00am tech
support call because I was being paged for our office being offline, after
telling me I should just go back to bed.

I had to have my CPE replaced once (although it probably should have been
replaced again late in the contract because it would sometimes lose sync and
have to be power cycled -- but I didn't press it since I knew the contract
was ending permanently in a few months).

All in all it was a pretty negative experience. That having been said, they
did get us up quickly when Verzion came back with a last minute facilities
issue that would have required 60 additional days to get a circuit installed
when I needed it in 7 (yes I did place the order 75 days in advance of the
planned turn up). So if you need a backup circuit that does not require a
local loop, I'd recommend them. Having your traffic transit their network
during an outage of your primary is probably the best they could be used for
IMO. I certainly wouldn't rely on them for my primary network connectivity
again.

Tabor

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Tabor J. Wells                                     twells at fsckit.net
Fsck It!                 Just another victim of the ambient morality