Review by Test99 
UPDATED: 108 days ago
member for 6.5 years, 3852 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Los Gatos,Santa Clara,CA
 $31 per month
 about 7 days
 Verizon
 "Senior technical support is superb."
 "After the initial contract period, the month-to-month price is higher."
 "Reliable service with multiple IP addresses."
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(ratings match consensus)
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There have been no known service interruptions in the year I have had DSLExtreme broadband.
I occasionally trade video files with customers, so the ten 25-megabyte web/FTP sites are much too small to be useful. I have to maintain a 250-megabyte site with another provider. The limit on the size of email attachments (10 megabytes, I think) has occasionally caused real inconvenience.
Converting to dry loop DSL was a miserable experience. See this thread for details: »Northern California Verizon Dry Loop . But that was the fault of the ILEC, not DSLExtreme.
At the end of the initial contract period, other ISPs I have used let me continue on a month-to-month basis for the same monthly rate. DSLExtreme requires either a new one-year commitment or charges a higher month-to-month rate. I will probably move within the next year, so a new one-year contract is not an option. The rate increase after one year does not seem reasonable. I compensated by downgrading to a lower speed.
Customer support is conscientious about resolving problems. First-line technical support is usually OK. Support by senior staff is superb. Support through the DSLExtreme BBR forum is a model for the industry. It would be great if more companies provided this kind of support.
Update 2008 November 29: when the underlying CLEC (Verizon) offered a speed increase at no extra charge (possibly in response to competition from Comcast), DSLExtreme promptly offered the speed increase, also at no extra charge. The upgrade was painless: service was interrupted after midnight for just a few minutes.
Update
Service has not worked from June 24, when I transitioned to PPPOE, as mandated by DSLExtreme, to the present (July 23).
After many attempts at contact with customer support, I finally learned the correct user ID to use for PPPOE on July 21.
On July 22, with cancellation pending, I finally had a productive troubleshooting session with a support person. His recommendations:
- If I want to use my Windows 2000 computer as a router, download additional software to support PPPOE.
- If I want to use my Windows 7 computer as a router (and I do), download additional software to hopefully fix problems with support of PPPOE.
- Alternatively, buy a hardware router.
I do a lot of VOIP testing. The last two routers I used actually crashed when presented with incoming IP-dialed calls. So finding a suitable router for my work is a non-trivial assignment. That's why I originally chose DSLExtreme's 5-IP service.
I did not request the transition to PPPOE. It was mandated by DSLExtreme. So I hoped DSLExtreme would be proactive in smoothing the transition. That did not happen. Customer support seemed unclear about why I had requested the change and what kind of service I had. One thought I had regular DSL, another thought I had fiber. (I have dry DSL.)
The Transition to PPPOE was basically left to me to manage. But my workload is much too heavy to take on an additional assignment, especially one that would result in reduced capabilities.
The transition to wireless broadband Internet access on the other hand, has been straightforward. And it has the advantage of not being tethered to a specific location. So I have decided to use wireless for all my Internet access.
I might have been more sympathetic if DSLExtreme had explained, in terms that a technical person could understand, why they had to mandate the transition to PPPOE. Such an explanation could at least have helped me to empathize with their situation and got me on board with the change. But in the BBR DSLExtreme forum, I got no satisfactory explanation for the change. I hate it when companies keep their information so close to the chest that the customer is left completely in the dark about what is really happening and why.
Regrettably, my business relationship with DSLExtreme has ended on an unhappy note. I am acutely aware from my own business that it takes work to keep a customer happy year in and year out. But without that work there wouldn't be a business. A business has to do whatever it takes to make things right when there is a problem. In this case, I think DSLExtreme dropped the ball.
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