[BBLISA] opinions on towerstream

[Dava Peters]

I am the 2nd. We are the towerstream customer for a
year and we had same problem with them. For unknown
reason, we lost the connection. We hated that because
we are hosting our own web site...



--

DP

--- "Tabor J. Wells" <twells at fsckit.net> wrote:
> 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
> 
> -- 
>
--------------------------------------------------------------------
> Tabor J. Wells                                    
> twells at fsckit.net
> Fsck It!                 Just another victim of the
> ambient morality
> 
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> bblisa at bblisa.org
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