Great Connection - Shoddy Partnership
Written: Nov 05 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Ultrafast connection, "safer" than broadband cable modems, easier to deal with than Qwest DSL.
Cons: Earthlink. 'Nuff said.
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| caradoc's Full Review: Sprint Broadband |
I've been a Sprint Broadband user since before they were "Sprint Broadband." You see, in the Phoenix area, the company known as SpeedChoice (a division of People's Choice Cable Television) has been providing high-speed bidirectional wireless connections for well over a year.
Back in April, they were "acquired" by Sprint, and became "Sprint Broadband Direct".
Anyone within a 35 mile radius of their antenna farm with a clear line-of-sight can enjoy 6-8Mbit/sec download speeds, with uplink rates of 128kbit/sec to 256kbit/sec depending on a number of variables including their subscription rate, the clarity of their line-of-sight, and their distance from the antenna farm.
Ping latencies are such that the service is useless for gaming, and there's a nasty stretch passing through BBNPlanet from their Phoenix location to the Earthlink servers. Other than that, speeds are truly excellent. I regularly download 20-30 megabyte files at speeds of 150-200kbyte/sec!
There are some unfortunate drawbacks to working with Sprint Broadband - not the least of which is Sprint's stupidity in partnering with Earthlink for the provision of e-mail and Usenet services. Earthlink's e-mail servers regularly "yo-yo", or go up and down at irregular intervals. If you call Earthlink's technical support during one of these outages, they will tell you that there's nothing wrong with the Earthlink servers, and that it must be a Sprint issue... despite clear evidence to the contrary in the fact that the Earthlink mail server *is* responding with a "Connection Refused" or a failure to authenticate.
Usenet services through Earthlink are even worse. "news.earthlink.net" is a farm of seven or eight Usenet servers, and it seems that one or the other is *always* down for some reason. If you're unlucky enough to connect to that "down" server by way of their "round-robined" DNS, you won't be able to read or post news unless you manually switch to another server by resetting your news client to go to a particular IP address. On top of this, their news servers regularly "belch" old postings labeled as "new".
Sprint Broadband is a perfect solution for a home office user who needs a high-speed connection to their office mail server. By bypassing the need to connect to Earthlink for any reason, the service approaches perfection.
If you have no other way to send or receive mail or news, Sprint Broadband is a terrible solution, as you'll be forced to deal with Earthlink whenever there's a problem - and that's often.
For their part, the Sprint technical staff is aware of the problems in dealing with Earthlink. Hopefully, they'll manage to pound some sense into them soon.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
caradoc
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 - Top 500 |
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Member: John Groseclose
Location: Scottsdale, AZ
Reviews written: 182
Trusted by: 133 members
About Me:
System admin, technology addict, knife thrower, and dog "caregiver."
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