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Review by irro 
Posted: 7.1 years ago
member for 7.1 years, 2 visits, last login: 7 years ago
 Tulia,Swisher,TX
 $40 per month (12 month contract)
 about 2 days
 "Everything about them rules!!! Never had any problems!!"
 "Towers went down one time.. but that was understandble, entire city was outa power, so it didn't make much difference"
 "RULES"
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MAN THIS ISP RULES!!!
i got minmiun service and i usually get connection ABOVE 1.5 meg down and 400k up!!!!!!!!!
not bad for a wireless internet, and for 40 bucks
I CAN'T BELIEVE I WAS PAYING MORE FOR DIAL UP THAN THIS!!! (extra phone line, and earthlink)
if your in the texas panhandle GET THIS SERVICE NOW!!!!
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Review by ToddPeterson
Posted: 7.2 years ago
member for 7.3 years, 16 visits, last login: 5.3 years ago
Schaumburg,Cook,IL
$65 per month
about 20 days
"Reasonable price, outstanding speeds (1.5Mb), great techs."
"Ugly antenna on my roof, high startup costs - $350."
"Compared to the next best thing, DirecPC, these guys rock."
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I've lived in the area for 6 years waiting for broadband that never arrived. DLS.NET beat the big guys to the punch. When you check their coverage area they operate only were cable/telco companies have snoozed and missed the opportunity.
Tech support is outstanding! They return calls and know what they're doing. It helps to be the new small guy on the block. They have to aim to please. Itinially I was getting about 700Kb up, then a big storm came through this summer and jossled by antenna. Speeds went down to 5-10Kb. I called support, they had someone out the next day. They re-aimed the dish - now at a new tower due east of me and now I get a stead 1.5Mb. Outstanding!
I've had ISDN and IDSL out here and these guys are just fantastic. I get average connect speed 1.3-1.5Mb. When I test through dsl reports tools, I get U/D of 60Kb/850Kb. When I test nearby servers, FTPs, and DLS.NETs test site testing.dls.net, I get very fast U/D speeds. (800Kb/1.5Mb). I find the 60Kb upload speed questionable. There cannot be that much Internet congestion. When I upload to my office FTP in Schaumburg I consistently get 1.3 - 1.6Mb.
Up to this point I can't say enough good things about them. If you can stomach the costs they're top notch. For being a smaller local ISP they're very professional and have a very streamlined system. I think it helps to totally bypass Ameritech. If you ever had to talk to an Ameritech tech you know they could care less about your pesky loss of service problem and how you should pay them for the privilege of having their techs no show on you, etc. etc.
I hope, as everyone does, their connect speeds won't degrade as they expand. I hear they're signing people up at a rate of 3 wireless customers a day and they want to 10 or more a day. I wish them luck.
Special thanks go to Matt, Adam, and Andy in their support department. You guys have it together.
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Review by radougherty
Posted: 7.2 years ago
member for 10.3 years, 3325 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Mundelein,Lake,IL
$75 per month
about 10 days
"They're providing broadband service where others just ignore us"
"None so far (if you don't mind an antenna on your roof and they use PPPoE, drats!"
"Good folks to do business with and so far the service is great"
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I live in Mundelein IL, population 30K, and we have no wire based broadband access. SBC doesn't have a CO in town and AT&T Narrowband has ignored us so far, rumor says late 2003 maybe for cable modem, but we've heard dates before that they missed.
Last October I signed up for Sprint Broadband Direct as soon as the extended the distance so they could reach us. The service started off great, I was seeing 4Mb downloads, but then packet loss started to creap up, three days ago I was seeing 23% and this was a Sunday AM on a clear day. Sprint never could fix the problem so I started to look for alternatives. One company AIRLOGIC.NET said they serviced Mundelein but when I tried to get service I was told no line of site, but if I got others to sign up in the area they would set up a node to cover our area. I asked if they would send out some flyers that I could pass around the neighborhood, but after saying they'd send them out three times I never got them so started to look again.
I'd seen DLS.NET on the net before but they mainly covered an area west of Mundelein but when I checked this time there was one small little circle on the coverage map that covered me, YEA!! I requested a prequalification on 8/6, called on 8/14 to see when I would hear something, they truck just checked on 8/13 and I could get service, and scheduled an install for 15:00 on 8/20. They showed up at 15:15 and got right to work, ripping out the old Spint antenna and running new wire and installing their antenna. The antenna is a parabolic wire dish type antenna, a bit bigger then Sprints but overall I think it looks better. Their Mundelein node in on Lemon road just about two blocks north of IL 176, about two blocks from my house, so I'm getting a great signal. The receiver/transmitter is mounted in the attic, to keep the coax run down, and they then run cat 5E ethernet to where you want to connect your equipment , in my case a router in the basement. This could be a pain if you need to check the indicator lights on the box and you need to make sure you have some power that they can plug into (they put an adapteron the light box so they had power.
So far I'm seeing an average of mid 20ms pinging their DNS servers or resources back at work on our corporate network. Running the DLSReports speed test at 17:45 on 8/20 showed 787Kbps down and 611Kbps up, not bad at all.
They use giganews for their news servers and boy does it fly compared to the garbage that Sprint/Earthlink provided with their service. DLS.Net does their own mail and so far no problems.
UPDATE 8/22 - On 8/21 we had some really bad storms pass through the area and my connection went down. It looks like lightning stuck somewhere near by and it wiped out the ethernet port on their radio, my firwall, a hub and two PCMCIA cards, plus one of my Dish DBS receivers. I called DLS that night and after doing some checking they schedule a tech to come out and replace the radio the next day. Tech showed up on time and within 45 minutes I was back up and running.
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 Review by FrankL6
Posted: 7.2 years ago
member for 7.4 years, 1088 visits, last login: 4.4 years ago
Algonquin,Mchenry,IL
$65 per month
about 12 days
"Fast, good pings, very reliable"
"pricey, need LOS, shared bandwidth, PPPoE"
"Great WISP, worth the price IMO"
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DLS Internet has finally brought broadband to my area, and they have done a great job. Their wireless service offers speeds up to 1mbit up and down (although I frequently get 1.1mbit on non-peak hours), but guarantees no more than 256k. Average speeds are about 700-900k. I've had their service for a few weeks now, and it has never gone down without a notice of maintenance ahead of time. It's also a great connection for gaming, and I get pings between 50 and 60 to many RTCW servers.
However, when they called to tell me that I was able to get their service on Sunday, we set the install date for Friday. I assumed they meant the coming friday, but apparently they meant the next one, and I wasted a whole day waiting for them. It was an honest mistake on their part so I wasn't too mad. They arrived on time the next Friday, and the install went smoothly. The antenna is a little unsightly, but it's hard to see from the street.
Other than that little mishap, there have been no problems and I haven't had to call tech support yet. The $350 install price is a little steep, but considering their the only ones who bothered to bring broadband here, I'd say it's worth it.
I also haven't experienced any weather related problems.
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Review by AntoineWG
Posted: 7.3 years ago
member for 7.3 years, 48 visits, last login: 5 years ago
Mchenry,Mchenry,IL
$65 per month
about 30 days
"Fast reliable connection, large coverage area, great customer service"
"Line of sight required, slow pretest and install times, $350 install cost, servers are prohibited"
"Well worth the wait and money if you can't get DSL or cablemodem"
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After a year of fighting with Ameritech about the quality of my phone line (I could only manage 26 kbps maximum, no matter where I was dialing into and they refused to condition my lines for DirecTV DSL service, whose coverage area I am well within) I decided to look for wireless in my area. I ran a search on Google and found the information page for DLS on this website and sent in a request for the pretest the same day.
After I sent in the request for the pretest, it took them about 2 weeks to come out and do it, and the results were good. Even though I'm reasonably close to the edge of their coverage area, I have very good signal strength. The pretest technicians were knowledgeable and were happy to answer any questions I had.
About 3 days later, they called me to tell me the pretest was successful and to schedule an installation. Unfortunately they were booked for the next 2 weeks, so I took the soonest available appointment. 2 weeks later, their install vehicle was in my driveway. Before the actual install, they did another test to find out exactly what direction the tower was in while we discussed where to mount the antenna. I was slightly dismayed when I found out that they didn't normally use the 12" square antenna for installations and I would need the larger parabolic dish. It's understandable though because I do live near the edge of their coverage area, which is much larger than Ameritech's DSL coverage area. By placing the bridge euipment in the attic within about 10 cable feet of the dish and running cat5 cable to my router in the basement, they were able to avoid using the higher-powered system, resulting in better reception. The equipment they used is rather small, a little larger than a videocassette. I'm not sure about the higher-powered signal booster (used in conjunction with the standard bridge) that they didn't need to use though.
At first, my router didn't want to talk to their network, but it turned out to be a misconfiguration on both our parts. The PPPoE interface on my SmoothWall router/firewall wasn't set to "dial" on demand and neither the installer or I knew about a minor flaw in my router that refuses the optional "@dls.net" part of my username. About 20 minutes after the installers left, I had the connection working properly. (Their installation agreement only says they have to have it talking to one of their laptops and they don't support any network equipment and/or routers/firewalls used by the customer, although they are allowed.) The installers did help troubleshoot though for about 15 minutes before having to leave for another install.
Now I'm enjoying fast connections between 256 and 700 kbps (400-500 kbps on average) without any drop-offs. Keep in mind that only 256 kbps is guaranteed, and the speed fluctuates about the same as other shared connection types like cablemodem or satellite. Furthermore, the latency is comparable to DSL and slightly faster than cablemodem, which is perfect for gaming.
All in all, their service is great. I have yet to have a drop-off, and only one serious sag which was corrected in about 20 minutes. The only drawbacks is the slow response times due to the overwhelming demand for their service in this largely broadband deprived area and the cost of $350 for installation and $65 per month. I give DLS 2 thumbs up.
-------Update-------
This week they called me saying that my connection was creating too many errors and could possibley be slowing down other customers. They came out and tweaked my dish's aim and installed the higher-powered 2 part bridge. The in house equipment is for the most part the same, just a different power supply, but they had to install the booster, a box about the size of a shoe, on the dish's mount on the roof. Fortunately, it doesn't require any additional cabling because it gets its power directly through the coax cable from the bridge. After they finished the upgrade they tested it. The signal strength from the tower hadn't changed, but the error rate dropped from ~25% to ~12%. I haven't seen much of a download speed increase, but my upload speed doubled! I'm not complaining about this free maintanance though, and I'm sure other people on my tower aren't complaining either.
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