Om Malik evidently isn’t too thrilled with Speakeasy these days. It would appear his complaints are centered around his attempt to leave their service because of competing, lower cost services.
First, why should Speakeasy make it easy for you to leave? It’s not in their interest. They don’t get anything out of making it easier for you to leave. He complains, “SBC disconnection fees are a $100 less. In other words a monopoly is charging me less to switch.” Of course it’s cheaper for them…they’re a monopoly. They control the entire system. They don’t get charged by a third party to do a disconnect.
Second, yes…other providers are cheaper. But he knew that when he signed up. Speakeasy has always charged a premium for their support and loose terms of service, both of which are far superior to any offering you’ll find with Comcast or SBC. You get what you pay for. If you don’t need those premiums, then Speakeasy isn’t for you. It’s like paying for 4WD on an SUV when you only drive it in the city.
It’s also odd to be bitching about disconnect fees when they advertise those pretty clearly going in. Why on earth is it in Speakeasy’s interest to lose more money (by lowering the disconnect fee) on a customer that committed to a year and then disconnected early? Speakeasy is not the choice of a purely price-driven consumer — I use Speakeasy because they’re the only broadband ISP I know of with TOS that make sense. Their service is good, too. They’re the only ISP I’ve dealt with where I didn’t have to escalate to “Tier 3″ support in order to talk to someone that might know anything. They’re the only ISP that treats me like I might possibly know something about networking.
Speakeasy is a reseller of Covad broadband. My biggest complaint is that you can’t get anywhere near the speeds they claim to be offering.
Port speeds don’t mean sh!t if you can’t get the throughput (which on ADSL you won’t).
I got socked with the disconnection fee from SpeakEasy when I got so fed up with the outages I told them to disconnect it. I am fighting the fee though because in my view they 1) did not use best efforts to keep me connected or 2) were unable to do so. I was down several times over the span of a few months. My dns constantly timed out. To top that off, my modem died, and when the sent me a new one, I didn’t “synch”. At that point I’d had enough with SpeakEasy. Why should they get windfall for providing such terrible service ?
Our experience was just the same as John’s. We experienced disconnects every month which were killing our business. I spent hours on the phone with them and all together had 20 trouble tickets in the period of a year. Finally I had enough and cancelled my service siting poor performance (obviously). They later charged my credit card on file for $1000.00 cancellation fee. I had never paid them by CC, but I had one on file from when I signed up. The charge was completely unauthorized. If you have had a similar experience file a complaint with the BBB at http://www.bbb.org. It may at least help the next guy.