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Review by pilotmadrat 
Posted: 4.5 years ago
member for 4.5 years, 0 visits, last login: 4.5 years ago
 Santa Cruz,Santa Cruz,CA
 $99 per month (24 month contract)
 "Lot better than dialup"
 "expensive, bad tech support, spotty performance"
 "Departed for better service"
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I had GateSpeed for almost 2 years. They are decent, but not great. There are services that are much faster for about the same money and cheeper services of lesser quality.
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Review by testioko
UPDATED: 5.9 years ago
member for 7.1 years, 2 visits, last login: 5.9 years ago
Santa Clara,Santa Clara,CA
$99 per month (12 month contract)
"Intelligent people, great connection, great value"
"Not always a perfect turn-key solution, you may need some tweaks"
"Well worth my time & money"
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*UPDATE* 12-01-2003
Has been over a year since I wrote this review. So, fyi...still with Gatespeed, still rocks, no problems, latest speed test (over a laptop 80211.b w/ other machines running):
240kb down/150kb up (not too bad=)
Still recommend these guys, just realize your location is important, so get a good site survey done (by them,free), and if you're okay by them, you are good to go =)
--------(Old Post follows)
I've been reading some of these reviews in general. Man, this is a tough crowd.
Let me just say this. I have been in desparate need of a quality high-speed ISP for 2 years now, I've been around the block and tried many providers/solutions. They have all failed me, either in terms of customer service, quality of connection, or just plain stupidity. Gatespeed is the only ISP that was able to accomodate my needs.
I don't make it a habit of writing rants and raves. And I waited quite a while before I posted my review for this ISP (I've been with them for about 6 months now). But if any of you are shopping and are interested, here's my story.
I'm a freelance web designer working from home in Santa Clara, CA. I cannot afford to have spotty, unreliable connection speeds, nor incompetent customer service when I contact my ISP. I researched PacBell&Earthlink DSL (which my neighbors have-okay for recreational browsing), Sprint Broadband, AT&T Digital Cable, and finally signed up with Innetix (now NextWeb).
[Note: The next few sentences are about Innetix, *not* Gatespeed] After signing up with Innetix, The next 4 months of my life were a living hell. Innetix's connection was so bad that I couldn't even correspond regularly over email. I could not reach them on the phone even during business hours. They would not give me a dial-up account to use as a backup. They went down (completey down) Christmas week, costing me thousands of dollars. Thankfully, they let me out of my contract, and my very jaded-self was on the hunt again. [End of Innetix horror story]
After a period of intense research (calling up isp's support and quizzing them, scrutinizing TOS, researching isp's/their customers), Gatespeed Broadband emerged as my best bet. The site survey was quick and painless, installation was blazing fast (within a week of my service order), the connection was rocking - more than the 256/256 I signed up for.
Now this is not a "peaches and cream" story. As we all know by the very existence of dslreports.com, broadband service is plagued with problems. The quality of your ISP provider really shows when these problems arise. I've had a few issues with Gatespeed's connection, but every time they came right away and did their best to resolve the problem. I am impressed how their staff is generally interested in addressing my concerns, and I am never lost in phone-hold-limbo, or told "Sorry, I don't do that. This is the [insert-name] dept., that's not my job". Even more impressive was the CEO who showed up at 2 of my install/service appointments. They generally underpromise and overdeliver in my experience.
In the end, with 2 or 3 followup visits/upgrades to the equipment, I am very happy with Gatespeed Broadband. I've seen people knock the $99/mo. charge, or even their TOS, but I think it's more than fair and would reccommend them to anyone.
regards,
Terry
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Review by RC51rider
UPDATED: 7.6 years ago
member for 8.6 years, 224 visits, last login: 1.9 years ago
Los Altos,Santa Clara,CA
$79 per month (24 month contract)
 about 10 days
"The connection used to Rock but it's still ok"
"Bandwidth limiting has been implemented :-(."
"A bit pricey, but service is first rate with fast connection and low ping"
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Can't get cable or quality high speed DSL at my location so I was pretty much resigned to living with 144K IDSL from Megapath. Not a bad option, but I do a lot of large downloads (LINUX distros) and wasn't really happy with the time required to complete one of these downloads. An added incentive for looking elsewhere came from Megapath adding a USF tax to my already high $89 mo IDSL ticket. Well to make a long story short, I decided to try GateSpeed wireless and they arranged a site survey three days later. The results were marginal (lots of trees) but there was a small 'window' to the tower, so I had to upgrade to the larger amplified ant. for a $100 additional to the net install cost of $299 (special price, normally $399). The total time from order to install was only 10 days. I typically see T1+ rates on both up/down! Static IP is provided and pings are typically 30ms. Latency is generally good but occassionally see slowdown, not often though. May be ok for gaming but haven't checked it out yet. Packet loss is my biggest issue (trees) but it's not causing me any real problems. Don't have a lot of time on the link but I'm monitoring it and so far it's GREAT! Packet loss (not GateSpeed's fault), some latency, and limited evaluation time are the only reasons I gave the connection reliability only a "4". Cost may be considered a bit high for residential use but this is one of those times when you get what you pay for.
4/2/02
Well, the rocket ride is over...GateSpeed has installed a bandwidth limiter on their Black Mountain tower :-(. Oh well, can't complain too much as I'm getting pretty much what I'm paying for, with ~256Kbps/ ~128Kbps. The downlink is a bit low, but I've just contacted support, so hopefully it'll soon be bumped-up to closer to 256Kbps. Still, it's better than the IDSL 144/144Kbps service I had before.
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Review by markyoder
Posted: 8.2 years ago
member for 8.2 years, 8 visits, last login: 6.3 years ago
San Jose,Santa Clara,CA
$199 per month (24 month contract)
about 7 days
"Awesome Speed!"
"None"
"After Trying @home, PacBell DSL, and Sprint Broad Band..... Gatespeed is by far the best!"
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Well, anyone else who lives in San Jose knows that it sucks trying to get that fat bandwidth pipe into your house. I had @home for a while in Los Gatos, and it was alright, but it had that 128kbps cap. I moved to San Jose, and tried PacBell, but the service kept cutting out. Even when it was on, it wasn't all that fast. So I cancelled. Next I tried Sprint Broadband. Sprint really really sucks. I have had nothing but problems. If you are surfing between 1 and 5 in the morning, it's pretty quick. But if you try to surf an any normal hours, you might as well go hook up your modem. During the evenings, I would be down in the 50 - 60kpbs range. And forget any kind of upload speed. After surfing dslreports, I found that Gatespeed was looking pretty good! I found out from sprint that there is a big difference between advertised speed and actual speed. Well, Gatespeed guarantees their speed. I currently have 1 megabit by 1 megabit. But lately I have been running closer to 1.2 down and 1.4 up! If you are any kind of power user, check these guys out. Bang for the buck, they are the best in town. (trust me, I've looked!)
Mark
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Gatespeed Broadband Inc.
