Review by Time4aNAP 
Posted: 1.5 years ago
member for 1.6 years, 58 visits, last login: 1.3 years ago
 Des Plaines,Cook,IL
 Business customer
 $125 per month (12 month contract)
 Southwestern Bell
 "Knowledgeable, helpful people. Professionalism exemplified!"
 "Their reliance on Covad. Covad is a weak link. SBC is downright evil!"
 "The best service that money can buy, outside of T/OC/Ethernet service."
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(ratings match consensus)
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I knew of Speakeasy by reputation, and when my RCN cable modem service developed severe reliability issues, I signed up with Speakeasy as a backup. Although RCN's advertised downstream rate was 6 Mbps, in practice, Speakeasy's 3 Mbps (@ 9500' from CO) was faster in every way. Similarly, I never once reached RCN's advertised 800 kbps upstream rate, but got every bit of the 768 kbps throughput that Speakeasy promised. As a professional who can do most of my work remotely, the $125/mo. price (w/ 6 static IPs) was worth every penny. If I figure in uptime, my $50/mo. (as part of a $95/mo. package) RCN service provided roughly the same number of usable minutes per dollar as Speakeasy. But unlike with Speakeasy, I never knew when RCN would go down. Can't put a price on that!
I was surprised by the amount of scheduled downtime with Speakeasy. For me, the timing was also inconvenient, since their maintenance took place at the same time of day (middle of the night) as mine. I can't fault them for this, since the majority of their business customers are 9-5 operations, just like mine.
Placing the order was simple and easy. My CPE arrived in two days, although it took another week for SBC to drag their feet before provisioning a local loop for me. Once that was done, a quick trip downstairs to the demarc, run a pair from the terminals for one of my apartment's circuits to the local loop terminals, then run back upstairs to see that I had sync! Piece of cake!
When SBC disconnected my local loop "by accident", not once, but twice at the CO, Speakeasy got it set straight ASAP. Thanks to their customer-readable communications, I was able to read the pointed warning that the Speakeasy supervisor sent to the SBC CO! After all of the crap that I've had to endure from SBC, that was a grand sight!
In October of 2006, I began moving from my home in 60610 to my new apartment in 60016.
I had made prior arrangements to have my phone line provisioned at the new location, so that I could maintain service at my old place, then bring my CPE out to the new one, and be online right away. Well, it didn't work out quite that way. The Covad tech who spent a lot of time on the phone with me while supposedly testing my connection inside my new apartment left me confident that I would be able to plug and play. But when I went to the designated phone jack, nothing.
It took five hours of (my) work to find out that none of the apartment's in-wall phone jacks worked, period. Apparently someone or some thing had severed the original phone cable in a place that wasn't readily accessible. Rather than take the time to fix it, some lazy installer simply ran a new cable to a single new jack, which is located in a place that I would not have chosen myself. But to add insult to injury, I discovered that at the demarc, the Covad tech had completely ignored the bold markings of my apartment on the terminal block, and had instead connected the local loop to the empty, unmarked space where the original line might have been connected originally.
If I had not had my own set of telephony troubleshooting tools, I would have been at it for a lot longer than five hours. I probably would have given up in disgust, and required another visit from Covad. On the bright side, this time SBC only disconnected me once...
My new cable company, Comcast, doesn't offer business service, so I have no choice but to rely on SBC-owned copper for my business Internet service (now down to 1.5/768 @ 11500'). And at least in the Chicago area, SBC gets its DSL service wholesale from Covad, so I know where Covad's loyalties lie. No other ISPs have a DSLAM at my CO, so that's what I'm stuck with. Thank God for Speakeasy being there to deal with these weasels!
Although their service isn't a great value as far as bandwidth per dollar, and I have very little confidence in the companies that Speakeasy has to deal with to get that service to me, the quality of Speakeasy's customer service continues to make it all worthwhile. Without them, there's no way that I'd ever give SBC (no matter what they call themselves today, tomorrow, or ever) another dime of my own money. And after this latest round of shenanigans, I'm not inclined to go directly to Covad either. So, although I must admit that what I get is not a great value in general, it's by far the best value in town.
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Speakeasy
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