Telocity seems cool at first, but if they only had a clue
Written: May 25 '01
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Pros: good speed, no contract or setup costs, allows you to host your own servers
Cons: bad customer support, connection can go down for hours or days
The Bottom Line: Telocity is ok, but if you can get better, go for it.
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| jeffdiaz's Full Review: Telocity DSL |
I ordered Telocity DSL service about eight months ago. They start you off on the right track, clean web sign-up interface, online customer support at the click of a button, etc. Then you get an email saying, "Thanks, we're beginning the installation process, go to this page for a status." Well well, they send you to a nice page showing exactly what it being done and an estimation of how long it will take. It all worked beautifully. I could log in at any time and see where things stood, and also see progress. A company that uses the web correctly, how novel.
Once it's all been hooked up and ready to go, they send you a package of equipment to install yourself. This is exactly what I want. I've worked in this field long enough that I don't need some tech guy that's only been doing it for a week to come into my house and act like they know what they're doing. Installation is rather simple, plug this wire here and that one there and you're good to go. One of Telocity's benefits was their explicit authorization to hook up multiple computers to the Internet if you so desire. Well, I do. So instead of their simple instructions of plug this into your computer and go, I hooked it into a DSL router/hub so I could have my whole house on the Internet, and host my own web site. And it all works great...most of the time.
Now come the problems. Late last year they had a number of problems. The connection would go down weekly and at random times. Or the connection would be up, but some websites would be unavailable because they had router issues. This was troublesome because the sites I was in need of connecting to where my own. When calling their technical support, they were less than helpful, all due to the fact that I hadn't connected their box to my computer directly, so they couldn't "run their tests" on the connection. However, *I* already knew the problem was their router and despite my telling them this they were unhelpful. They would tell me, "we can't help you unless you hook the box up to your machine directly" and I'd keep responding, "the problem isn't my connection, the problem is your router, hooking it up to my machine won't help".
Early this year Telocity sent out an email to everyone letting us all know that they were replacing a number of their routers on their network due to reliability issues. I felt this was a good move on their part.
Since then it's been fairly easy going. The connection does tend to go down for about 15 minutes every night around midnight. And every so often the connection will just go away for hours or days. Calling their tech support line will give the message saying they know about an outage and they're working to repair it. No estimated time of repair. And typically the outage they are talking about references a city two hours away from me, but still affects me.
All in all, it's not really a bad service. When up, it's very fast and my own website is even quite snappy. If you can find a better service in your area, go for it, but if you settle on Telocity, you should be fine.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 50.00
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Epinions.com ID:
jeffdiaz
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Location: Jacksonville, FL
Reviews written: 4
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
All around computer guy (focusing on the Internet right now).
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