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Review by timpani1 
UPDATED: 5.2 years ago
member for 9.4 years, 183 visits, last login: 2.3 years ago
 Vacaville,Solano,CA
 $50 per month (12 month contract)
 about 120 days
 "It's the only alternative to DSL or Cable in remote areas of Vacaville where there is none."
 "Tech support is mediocre at best. That's IF you can get a hold of someone who is knowledgeable."
 "If you live in an area of Solano county where there are alternatives, I'd advise against this company."
| Pre Sales Information:
Install process:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
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ISP: JC's Interactive Systems
2499 B1 Martin Road
Fairfield, CA 94534
1-888-729-9992
Type of service: Wireless Broadband
Cost: $50 a month for 512k down/ 168k up (basic service)
Please forgive the length of this story, but this whole mess was a
nightmare. I've got a mini blog going here on my issues from installation up until present day.
At the end of October 2003, I found I could not get DSL or Cable
internet in my remote area of Vacaville. I received a flyer at my
door from JC's Interactive Systems advertising wireless broadband for
my area. The price seemed reasonable, and they were offering up to a
$300 rebate on the wireless antenna. Sounded good, and I had just
moved from an apartment with DSL service. Reverting back to a modem
wasn't cutting it for me. I was told it would take about a week to
get the antenna, then they would schedule an installation date.
I was asked if my house was a one story house, because for anything
more than that, professional satellite installers would need to come
to take care of it. My house is one story; they said no problem.
About a week later, they sent one of their techs out to do an
"install." I use that term carefully because this guy didn't have so
much as a ladder to get on to the roof, or even a screwdriver. He was
going to mount the antenna on a fencepost and snake a cable through
one of my windows. Since my fiancee was becoming concerned about this
guy, and I was at work and couldn't see what he
was doing, I told him over the phone that he needed to leave. I
called the president of the company and read him the riot act. He
then proceeded to tell me that this installation was a "courtesy" and
if I wanted the wiring and installation done, I would need to
schedule an installation with satellite people at a minimum
additional cost of $200. I don't know what the courtesy was,
because the tech didn't have any tools to complete the installation.
The professional installation was in addition to the $400 I was being
charged for the antenna. Bear in mind, this is supposedly a company
that sets up networks for large corporations in the Fairfield
area. It bothered me a bit that they would refuse to do wiring in a
residence. A week after this appointment, the satellite installers
came and installed the antenna. When I got connected, I was seeing a
signal to noise ratio of between 8 and 10. I was told that this was
good. I would later find out that this wasn't even close to the SNR
ratios I should have been seeing for a solid signal.
Over the following three + months, I would frequently experience
extremely high latency. Ping times in the triple to quadruple digits
-- usually on weekends, and sometimes for stretches during several
weeknights. First, I chalked it up to atmospheric conditions,
but it wasn't always coinciding with bad weather. I figure if you
total up all of the nights I needed to
revert to my 56k modem to upload a 30k file to my school newsgroup,
or even load a simple web page, I've probably gotten a month's worth
of downtime. I placed some trouble tickets in December with
promises that a tech would get back to me, and I never was contacted.
I once again contacted the president of the company, and finally was
able to get him on-site at the end of January to take a look. He
thought the latency was being caused by either the angle or the
height of my antenna. He also raised the possibility of swapping out
my basic antenna for an amped antenna at no cost to me. When he
looked at my stats, he saw that I was seeing unusually high local
noise. When he got up on the roof to try to raise and readjust the
antenna, he noticed that a neighbor was operating a linear amp, and
determined this was most likely interfering with my signal. He said
an amped antenna was my only option, and should fix the problem. He
also said that my signal to noise ratio should be between 12 and 16,
not 8 and 10. He then changed his tune and said that since this
wasn't being caused by his network (it only took him three months to
get his butt out to my home to check this out,) he would sell me the
new antenna for $100 to cover his costs. This is after I had an
e-mail from him in writing that this would be a no cost swap, and
after he admitted that his tech should have caught this problem on
the initial site sweep three months ago. He said the antenna would
arrive in about 7-10 days, and would put in an order on Monday
morning. During this site visit, he had an amped antenna in his car but did not put it up to test it.
Three weeks have now gone by. I'm still getting such high latency
that my fiancee can't upload files to her company website when she
telecommutes, and I can't get connected to my corporate VPN
to do after hours maintenance on our servers. I was told last week by
the president of the company to give him a call or drop an e-mail to
request status on the antenna. I e-mailed on Monday and there was no
response. I called on Wednesday and left a voicemail, and he never
returns calls. I spoke to a tech today that was doing his best to
contact him, but he was supposedly ignoring his text messages.
I'm now at my wits end and am writing this review to get the
word out that this company is more
trouble than its worth. I'm trying to get this worked out in
good faith, and am at the limit of my patience. I'm quite sure that
if a corporate customer was seeing the same problems, he'd be right
on it. I guess residential customers are considered inferior by these
companies. At this point, I'm ready to write to the Better Business
Bureau to get this resolved, because for what I was told would be a
simple solution to the problem, I'm getting the runaround.
2/16/2004 **Update**
I had to resort to sending a formal complaint letter to the president of the company outlining my dissatisfaction with my service to date. After all of the ignored e-mails, voicemails, etc. last week, I finally got an e-mail reply back on Friday saying that the amped antennas were on backorder, and it could be another 7-10 days. Funny that he didn't simply tell me this when I first asked. I'm reserving further judgment until this antenna is produced. Hopefully there's a light at the end of the tunnel here, but I'm not holding my breath......
2/23/2004 **Update**
I finally got a call on 2/20 from the president of the company stating he had the new antenna and wanted me to call him back to setup a time frame for him to come by on the same day to swap out the antennas. I called back less than 15 minutes from his voicemail. I was told he was in a conference call, but could leave a message. Let him know I could do it anytime after 5:30pm. I called later in the day letting him know I would be home early and was available from 3:30 on. Left vm for him to call if there was any problem showing up at either of those times.
I then proceeded to wait from 3:30, and never heard from him one way or the other. Finally it got dark, and at 7pm, I left messages for him to call back asap. I was beyond livid at that point. At 7:30pm, he finally has the wherewithal to call me to let me know he wasn't coming. I got every excuse in the book about how he was at a client site on an emergency (seems like he's on these "emergencies" every time I call his office,) how he couldn't call me, and how he just got both of my messages. Remember, he was supposedly in the office when I left the first vm. He also gave me a song and dance about how he didn't have a ladder to do the installation with, but thought somehow he was reassuring me that he had the antenna sitting in his car. My question is: why schedule an appointment with me to do the swap if you have no way to get on the roof to do it? I then told him I was losing my patience and was ready to file complaints with the BBB unless he came by on Saturday at my convenience to put the antenna up because four months of high latency was just unacceptable. It took a few minutes to get him to commit to a one hour time frame.
On 2/21, he came to swap out the antenna, and immediately tried to repeat the same troubleshooting he did one month before, claiming if I raised my antenna another FOUR feet, my signal would improve. I guess he was suffering from amnesia, because when we tried raising it last month, the signal got even worse. He then backtracked on his story from last month claiming my SNR values of 8-10 should be fine. That was a complete reversal of what he told me about any value under 12 being unacceptable. He finally installed the new antenna, and the high latency stopped. It turns out that the amped antenna he gave me was the same test antenna he had in his car the first time he came in January. I'm getting charged $100 for this equipment, but I'm biting the bullet because the problem seems to have gone away.
Bottom line: I'm glad the high latency is gone, but no one should have deal with this kind of buck passing. What it took to get to this point was just plain unacceptable. He had this antenna last month, and could have saved a world of problems if he just tried it to begin with. He is the president of this company, and should have known from a customer service perspective that it is just plain wrong to leave a customer twisting in the wind for over 4 months when he/she is paying for service that is not being provided reliably. Hopefully these problems will not reoccur, because this is the only high speed option I have in my area. DSL could take years, and Comcast is supposedly "upgrading" their lines, but they have no idea when it will be in our neighborhood.
UPDATE **7/26/2004**
After several months of somewhat reliable service, I am experiencing downtime again. Over the span of two weeks, I experienced downtime about 5 times, each time for several hours. This last outage from 7/24-25 lasted over 15 hours. It took a tech 14 hours to return my call to their "emergency" line. (I do on-call support for my employer, so I consider no signal an emergency, since I can't remote in.) The return phone call didn't happen until I called their emergency line 3 times and left a message, as well as leaving a message with the president of the company. After all of that waiting, I was told I should have rebooted my router, computer, firewall, etc. After so many calls to this company reporting problems, I think it's known that I do this anytime I have an outage, and I do it BEFORE I call anyone. Nevertheless, they agreed to page the president of the company to find out what's going on. Supposedly their "monitoring server" didn't pick up the fact that I lost my signal. I guess it didn't pick up that fact during the 5 or so outages I had this week. I'm just biding my time now, anyway because once my year committment is up, I plan on switching to cable internet. I'm sure that will come with another host of problems, but I'd much rather have a wired line to my home than this. Wireless is great, and I get great speeds WHEN it works. This company still hasn't learned a valuable lesson in keeping customers informed of network status, especially if maintenance is going on. I found out this week that they were swapping out equipment. If it took 15 hours to respond to an emergency call, and I'm just John Q. Consumer calling, I can't imagine how they respond to some of their corporate clients who have lost a connection. My guess is they are given preferential treatment.
**Update 8/16/04
Once again, I have had several unannounced daily outages of my service over the past two weeks. It's amazing how many times I have to reboot my firewall to re-establish my connection. Recently, they added some sort of spam filter to their mail server, which gives you no options on your end to configure. Their own e-mail bills are marked as spam! I have a feeling they just installed the software at defaults, then let it ride. I'm now getting letters from credit cards and my bank saying that e-mail statements are being bounced back as undeliverable, even though they have the correct e-mail address. Most likely it is their spam filter. I did send an e-mail to the company president once again, asking about this, and it has gone unanswered after several days. I'm not hoping for a miracle here, but one can dream! Comcast is looking much more promising by the minute.......
**Update 8/23/04
Well..I never received a response re: the spam filters they are using. I guess inconveniencing the customer isn't a big deal to them. Proof positive of this came on Thursday 8/19 when I lost the signal to their network for the entire day. Their "monitoring software" must not be doing such a great job, because each time I lose the signal completely, I have to call their paging system to get it re-established. This is also proof that the problem is not with my network, but with their equipment at their AP. I went out of town for the weekend, and when I came back on Sunday, my signal lasted for about 90 minutes before it completely crapped out. They responded a bit quicker this time, but no explanation is ever given as to why this keeps happening on a regular basis, especially when their tech keeps telling me (when I get to speak with a human being there) that they are swapping out their equipment for "newer" equipment. Is it just me, or shouldn't that help to make the reliability of their service better? Just my two cents......
** Update 8/25/04
Looks like they are having issues with their DHCP/DNS server. (This isn't the first time with this little problem.) Their DNS seems to get hosed on a regular basis, and you can never confirm that their backup DNS server is running because their routers appear to be blocking ICMP packets. I can't ping the secondary to find out if it is even responding. DHCP is another issue. If it isn't completely down, which also happens too often for comfort, it is doing strange things. For about 7 hours last night, it was handing out 10 minute leases to clients! That's right -- 10 minutes! It was still doing it when I tried to check e-mail this morning to no avail. DNS was still down. Have these guys heard of SNMP monitoring? Come on...it's not that hard to monitor DNS in this day and age. I'm looking into alternative providers at this point, because this is becoming a really bad joke......
** 8/26/04
I got a flowery e-mail from the president of the company outlining all of the infrastructure upgrads that have been done over the past few weeks. Fine and dandy...that's if the problems over the past few days were signal problems, which they weren't. He ignored most of my e-mail which pinned the problem on DNS going down. I confirmed it again this morning. I was able to get a DHCP address, but no DNS resolution. Their DHCP and DNS services run on the same box, so it isn't signal loss from my home to his AP. The DNS service was clearly down this morning, just like it was yesterday. Signal from home to AP was solid as a rock. Improving signal strength is a wonderful idea...but I think this company needs to get better monitoring and needs to watch simple services like DHCP and DNS. DNS is pretty basic, folks....it can also be the weakest link in the chain if it isn't running, no matter how much you upgrade the fancy hardware outside the datacenter......
*** Update 9/4/04
Well, I finally took the plunge and dumped JC's Interactive like a hot potato yesterday. Comcast came in and set me up with a 3Mbps pipe for the same price as I was paying for 512K down with intermittent service. Apparently JC's will buy back used antennas, (at least the tech I spoke to told me that when I called to cancel the account) and I left a message with the president of the company about the possibility of selling it back. He never returned my call. Oh, well. If he doesn't want it, I'm sure I can unload it on e-bay.......
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