Review by dagg 
UPDATED: 1.3 years ago
member for 8.6 years, 303 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Rio Linda,Sacramento,CA
 $109 per month (12 month contract)
 about 35 days
 SBC
 "3.0 down/768 up its a real connection"
 "Major snafu when I ordered added a LOT of time to turnup"
 "it costs more, but I dont really have too many problems with them"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
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Pre sales: I previously had 1.5/384 Line Shared and was going to need a lot more bandwidth so I decided to go with the 6.0/768 service which I did preqal for. turns out that the LEC had bad info on the loop length and my line was actually a few hundred feet longer than the prequal said it was. Well, this meant that Covad had to cancel the order & could not place an order for the 3.0 circuit untill the existing order cleared out. That was supposed to take a week. After two weeks Covad had to escalate the issue to manually clear out the order which took an extra few days. It took 2.5 weeks just to place the order. Once that was done my next hurdle was the fact that I asked for a wireless CPE and because of the problems that I was having, I thought it would be really nice of Covad if they waved the charges for the upgrade... The rep I talked to agreed and apparently so did his supervisor as they informed me that it was taken care of and I would get a free upgrade to a wireless router.
Day of install: When the day for the install came, I wound up getting a brightport 8120. I was less than thrilled. The really great part was the fact that even though one of the customer service reps found the notes, they informed me that I would not be able to get the wireless because the installer had already used a non-wireless CPE and his notes didnt show that I should have gotten a wireless CPE. Since I had a couple wireless AP's laying around the house, I wasnt too worried about it because I was just relieved that the Circuit had finally been installed. My joy would be very short lived. The Brightport worked better as a door stop than it did a CPE (I now use it for target practice after finding my own solution) and the circuit would not stay stable. Since the original line share circuit had not yet been canceled, I was able to place it on that circuit & prove to support that it was in fact the CPE that was causing the problems. So they shipped me out a new CPE (no I was informed that I would not be getting the wireless that I had previously been promised unless I paid for it). A few days later, an installer showed up with a new brightport and put that in place. Again, same exact issues. I was again able to use the old Zyxel to show that it stayed in sync just fine on either circuit and that the second Brightport was little more than a door stop. I gave up at this point & just said I would use the zyxel if they were planning on sending me another brightport.
The next problem after that was a huge billing nightmare. By this time the first bill was coming due very quickly. I was supposed to have about $300 in rebates that I had to send in with the first payment. Because of all the hassles I had with the install, I asked them if they could just place a credit on the account and skip the rebates. After a long conversation on the phone, I was told that I could do that. Imagine my utter LACK of surprise when the bill came and there were no credits on there. A call to customer service informed me that yes, again the notes were there that showed they said I COULD do that, but now that it had been billed, I would have to pay the full amount and send in the rebates. This is the point that I determined that while I have rarely over the last 3 years had a problem with tech support.... customer service must be staffed by rabid hung-over baboons with a severe lack of social skills. I finally caved to the simians and paid the bill and sent the rebates in... but I was very unhappy about.it... ultimately I suppose that doesnt matter because they still got their money in the end.
I have had very few problems with support at covad except for the rare times that the problem I am experiencing is just very unusual... then it can be somewhat difficult to get the concept of what is actually happening across. Even those times however are not that big a deal as I usually get escalated to the next level of support & they just go "oh... well do this..." and generally it works (or at least makes sense to try it).
Services: I get an IP and I get bandwidth... anything else on top of that is gravy to me...
Value: Its a bit more expensive. There are three different providers that I could switch to all with lower costs, but I have found that its better to get as many middle men out of the way as possible and since I hate SBC with a glowing red passion Covad fits the bill there. The other thing is that its not a standard residential service. If it goes down I like to know that I am paying for the right to be extremely cranky with them until they get it back up... so far though, I have never had an outage that lasted more than one continuous day. (knock knock knock).
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