 Review by SterlingJ85 
UPDATED: 2 years ago
member for 8.9 years, 1851 visits, last login: 1 days ago
 New York,New York,NY
 Business customer
 $625 per month (12 month contract)
 about 6 days
 "No Verizon (NYC businesses really get this one), Works!"
 "Customer Service starting to really lag"
 "Not bad, and its nice to get around Verizon altogether."
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My company is located in the Empire State Building, and unfortunately, the building management is too inept to have our building wired with any fiber companies (like Cogent). Our only inbuilding providers are Eureka Networks and TimeWarner. Both offer up to about T3 speed, but its far too expensive to even really be considered against other ILEC/CLEC (telco) offerings. Read up on TowerStream and it seemed pretty good, so I signed up for TowerStream's 5 Mbps for $500 with a free install.
The 5 Mbps is symmetrical, but only 1.5 is guaranteed (99.99% annualized SLA) with the remaining being "best effort". So far i'm pulling around 2 Mbps during peak times, still have to check out the off-peak times. The link has been up for about 15 hours so far, and it's looking pretty good.
I will update again once sometime has passed.
Updated: 3/2/06
We were having a little bit of a problem with speed being lower than it should have been (pulling about 1.4 - 1.6 Mbps, which is RIGHT at the minimum levels.
After a couple of calls to TowerStream, they agreed to send out an installer to move us onto another access point that was lower utilized in an effort to take advantage of better speeds (again, at best effort - not guaranteed).
We are now hitting right around 3 Mbps up and downstream, pretty consistently.
The new point is on the Citi Group building in Long Island City, which thankfully we have an excellent view to as well!
Doing pretty well, I have SiteUptime.com pinging our router every 5 minutes and only 1 ping or so doesn't make it through around 2:30 - 3 AM once every 2 days or so.
Updated: 4/26/06
I called 3 weeks ago to increase speed to guaranteed 2 Mbps (burstable to 5 Mbps) for $625.
Using Packeteer and other monitoring tools, I am seeing a consistent and solid 2 Mbps minimum with very frequent bursts up to 5 Mbps (average of about 3.5 Mbps).
Things are great, last month had 100% uptime (5 min pings), and April is looking the same!
Updated: 10/11/07
No major downtime to speak of, the connection has been pretty solid.
However we are moving up in need for speed.
I have placed an order for a DS3 with XO because TowerStream is more expensive *than any other telco or CLEC i've gotten a quote for*. A bit odd, since their marketing tag lines talk about freeing yourself from telephone companies. You'd think there would be some competitive pricing there!
Upon trying to cancel service I was notified that our 1 year contract signed in Jan. '06, auto-renewed itself. So now I will be forced to pay for 2 more months of service we won't even use.
Kind of glad to be leaving TowerStream now. The lack of customer service is really starting to suck to be quite honest. Tech support however is fantastic, always answering the phone and will usually tell YOU about outages before you even realize it (this was a backup connection, not a primary!).
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