Review of DSL EXTREMEAll reviews of |  about |
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Actual speed is about 2.5M/300K which seems reasonable for this kind of DSL in the apartment complex. The price is right, $20/mo for decent speed is the best I could find in my area. 2 things I don't like: (1) having to deal with AT&T for the basic landline I had to put in ($10/mo) because I just don't have any use for the landline, (2) 12-mo contract to get the $20/mo price kind of sucks because I don't know how it'll affect me when I later move out of this place, I don't want to get slapped with a fee for disconnecting simply because my apartment lease and this 12-mo period are out of sync. Followup comments:
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Ordered 768K/128K - that was supposed to be $29, performed badly. Switched to the 1.5K/512K at $39/mo and then they kept screwing me around about having a "contract".. friggin beancounters need to be taken out and SHOT! Now paying $50/month for month-to-month service. UHUH... Have had 4 modems in 6 years - is that good or bad? I dunno...you decide. Port 445, 135 and 139 blocking never seems to stick - I can't think of a better time to simply DITCH DSLextreme and go to FiOS. My plan would be trading a $110/month combined cost for one that costs $70/month...do the math! SAYONARA YOU JERKS! Followup comments:
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I've never been late or missed a payment in all the years I was with DSLX so I called them and was told that the $250 is a CANCELLATION FEE. You want me to continue to pay a monthly fee or the lump sum of $250, I reasoned with the customer service representative, for a service DSLX is unable or unwilling to provide me? Yes, that is the DSLX policy - EVEN if we cannot provide you service you must pay or face collection. What an outrageous policy! You take what has been a positive customer experience, built up over a number of years, and blow it up by one final insane and utterly unreasonable action. An absolutely brilliant marketing strategy! Followup comments:
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Time to renew again, which I will do. Followup comments:
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So, it's been about two years now and as far as connection reliability goes, I think I have had 3 outages (that I know of), none of them were longer than an hour though. I started off with 768/384 speed. I was getting about 670/310 which I guess is OK. I called up the tech guys about a year ago and asked them if I could get 1500, they said I could pay for it but it would be a waste because of my distance from the CO that I wouldn't get more than 900. So, a year passes and it was time to renew my account this April of 2009, I went ahead and renewed at 1500/384, since it was only $1 more a month. I figured if I really didn't get more than 900 I would just be wasting $12 for the entire year. I did a speed test about an hour after ordering and my speed was 1293/305. I have done 11 tests since upgrading 5 days ago; the high has been 1314 the low has been 720 (don't know what the heck happened there), the mean has been 1283, which I guess is pretty good. Tech support does seem a little shaky at times, but AT LEAST they are in English. I really HATE calling up tech support and getting a guy from India. Nothing against people from India, but they are usually hard to understand and it just doesn't feel as solid. At a grand total of $23.83 a month for everything, I find DSL Extreme to be a good deal for the money. My modem is a D-Link. Model: DSL-2320B Followup comments:
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eves & weekends. we are in verizon territory. they say its verizon, but we have been able to get on wirelessly with other networks. speed is a lot less than advertised. seems like dsl extreme is going downhill. i think i might switch to verizon for my ISP. would like DSLX to refund us some of our monthly fee due to the often and random drops in service Followup comments:
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So instead I got the best next thing, 3000/512 Order and install was easy Already had old equipment from SBC/ATT just had to wait for them to make the switch over to DSLX. Overall great service and tech's know what they are doing Followup comments:
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I contacted DslExtreme support team. I talked to several techs. This is where it's a crap shoot. Some techs were very friendly and communicative, while others really need to learn some basic communication skills (instead of just grunting). My problem was finally resolved when i pm'd the GM. He responded quickly and I had a AT&T tech at my house a couple of days later. The tech found the problem on the outside line. It's all good again. I recommend DslExtreme. Followup comments:
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Got a new line in a recent upgrade, so the circuit has been much more stable-only one outage in the past month. New mail service not quite as convenient as old (folders, for example, and IMAP access to Spam are both missing-not supported by Gmail). Harder to get ahold of also, but issues are also down. Otherwise still a great choice. Update 9/23/08 No changes in service or support since last update. Working through the issues of the new mail service and new news service, but seem to be toward the better overall once a few quirks are ironed out. Better spam filtering from Gmail. Still waiting for AT&T to earn their cut. Update 3/22/08 In the Winter the line is a little better, so things are working pretty well until it gets warmer. Still occasional synch problems; sometimes down for a period of hours due to interferors on the line that AT&T refuses to do anything about. Fortunately have a couple of neighbors with open wifi. DSLX sent out a free modem to try; works fine but still have the resynch problem. Provides more complete statistics to monitor, though. Upgraded my rate to 3008/512 since the interference is pretty much independent of rate and resynchs occur anyway. At least the usable time is at a higher rate for only $5 more/month. Still great service except from AT&T. Maybe an improved line someday.  Update 9/17/07 Line still sucks, even after SBC became AT&T. Had 30-40 resynchs a day during recent hot spell; at least part of the problem is thermal effects on the old crappy lines to the CO. Now that things are cooler, resynchs are down to a reasonable level. I was out of the country for 6 months over the Winter (Mexico) so can't comment on how cool weather performance fared. Price has gone up, service is still good. Still highly recommended; just renewed for another year. Update 10/23/2006 No change to service quality, but DSLX helped me move service to the other phone line to take advantage of the $12.95/month promotional rate. It is also the fax line, so there are fewer incoming calls to interfere with the DSL signal during periods of poor line quality from ATT. They also sent out an ATT DSL technician when lines were changed to see if anything could be done to improve quality-no such luck! Inside wiring is fine, outside is at the mercy of the other ATT customers in the bundle and outside interference on their lines. Update 4/21/06 Still humming along after 6 more months with DSLX. Line still resynchs more than desirable, but no longer monitoring-it is the best it will get unless SBC puts in a RT. Seems to be better in the winter (thermal?). Other services working fine, even after the buyout. Redirection of misspellings was not an issue for me. Hope they don't take the forum private, but that is the only new concern I have seen. Only additional feature I would like is secure logon to the news servers-I use wireless sometimes, and do not want to expose my password. So I subscribe to an alternate news service for 10 Euros/year. Otherwise, keep up the good work. Update 10/14/05 Tried to upgrade to 3M rate, but SBC/ASI refused-too many line problems at the time. As soon as this happened, the line miraculously improved quite a bit. But I am still sticking with the 1.5M. Switched service from second line to primary line in anticipation of cancelling the second telephone line; DSLX managed to get the new line up early so I could compare them, and, of course, no outage in the switch. Both new line and old line were much improved already (SBC/ASI miracle), but I added a splitter and dedicated cat5 line anyway. Still occasional resynchs during the day, but seem to be much more isolated than before. Also saving $10/month by moving to the other line, since DSLX was able to get me the new customer rate there. DSLX added more online service tech help, so even better than before. Update 5/16/2005 Still some periods of line interference, but obviously much less impact at the lower rate. Lots of free upgrades by DSLX. Now using DHCP instead of PPPOE, removing a failure-prone protocol from the system--I often got PPP failures; now no problems. Rarely see virii now, since most are filtered out by the DSLX server. Spam blocker catches a fair amount of stuff, but doesn't seem to get updated often enough to be really effective. Firewall is new (beta) and has only a few settable levels so far, but blocks the obvious port traffic and pings-upgrades are planned, but not announced yet. And the price just went down, although customers need to wait to the end of their current contracts to take advantage of it. Service still great, especially via forum. Lots of patience shown with customers whose problems really have nothing to do with DSL Extreme; DSLX tries to work them anyway. Will continue to watch line characteristics to decide whether to upgrade to 3K for $8/mo or stay the same and save $2/mo when current contract is up. By far the best choice in Southern California. Update 11/16/2004 Finally gave up on the high rate service and downgraded to 1536/384 and PPPOE-Save $38/month for a $50 downgrade charge and only miss the higher rates occasionally. Never found a solution to the intermittent line problems. Lots of technical support from DSLX to chase it down though. DSLX had ASI send a truck out to test internal/external wiring and they found no problems. Thye also wired in a new NID for me to be sure the interface was OK. But there are still periods with higher attenuation and poorer performance with associated dropout/resynch, just not as severe at the lower speeds and higher margins. DSLX even tried to get my circuit path rerouted to the CO to avoid external interferors, but there just wasn't a bundle that supported an alternate route. So the price is great, service and support can't be beat, line is more stable now. Have some problems with PPP disconnects every 4 hours while the system is idle, but not a real issue since it generally doesn't occur while I am up and using the circuit. Tried different modem brands without impacting the PPP problem; switching to bridge mode and using an external router to support PPPOE seemed to be the only thing that solved the problem. For now I am happy just getting new IPs while I sleep and letting the modem reconnect. So DSLX seems to have done everything they can to optimize my service, even though I pay them less now. BTW, the ASI tech who came out and tested my lines measured my distance from the CO as 11K ft, so I will probably never be able to upgrade again. And I still hope SBC will finish undergrounding the lines someday or put in an RT. Update 9/17/2004 Have been generally happy with the upgraded 6016/608 service, except for line interference frequently causing resynchs and dropouts. The actual line quality seems fine; it looks like the problems are caused by external noise sources-streetlights, generators, SBC is even undergrounding lines in my area-attenuation will suddenly go up for a while (minutes to tens of minutes), then back down, or with adequate SNR margins there will be high CRC error rates and eventual resynch. Discussions with DSLX haven't uncovered any solution. Since I am 9100 feet out, I expected some problems, but have been surprised by the volatility. Most of the time service is 5Mbps are better, but there are fairly often (daily to few days) periods (minutes to tens of minutes) of nearly continuous resynch, as well as times when even 1536 Kbps has lots of errors. Decided not to cap or downgrade, since most of the time the rates are fine-the errors appear to be burst noise, and even occur at 1536 Kbps. Tech support and services have been great, and DSLX is a good value even with the problems. And maybe SBC will finally finish working on the lines or install an RT. Update 3/20/04 Just upgraded to the 6016/608 service after being very pleased with the regular 1536/256 service. Transition took about a week, with no outage. Originally I could not get the higher speed service since I was over 7500 ft from the CO, but near the end of the offer SBC relented and allowed up to 9500 ft to be offered by DSLX-I am about 9150 ft according to SBC. At first I was profiled at a fixed rate of 4032/384, which worked flawlessly but was not top speed. I did a few things to clean up my line, and asked George to put me on the rate adaptive profile. I was able to synch at the full 6016/608 rate, and things worked well. Had to switch to a wired Westell 2200 connection, since the rates were too much for my wireless B NIC. After a day or so I started getting unexplained PPPOE errors, so George switched me to a static IP at no charge, and the errors went away. I am still trying to understand some of the line errors, but service has been both reliable and blazingly fast (5156/520) and online support has been really terrific. Being able to interact directly and quickly with DSLX online is a real advantage of DSLX. I also have made great use of a couple of my 25MB websites, which were one of the original swingers for choosing DSLX over SBC/Yahoo. Thanks again, George and DSLX. 11/03 Review Looked for a new DSL provider after a year when rates went down, and my previous ISPs service went down but rates didn't. DSLX provided a good price, a well rated service, and rapid online support through DSLR as well as on their own. I was very pleased when service was turned on early at the maximum rates provided for in my contract. I have already re-setup my website, and mail and news are working just fine. I ordered PPPOE at 384-1536/128-256 and got provisioned at 1536/256, actuals around 1300/220 (I am about 9000 ft from the CO), I use a Speedstream 5660 DSL router with a WAP, and have seen good support online from DSLX for home network configurations, although I had no problems-just changed the logon and the DNSs and everything worked. 7 days from order to transition with zero outage. George (who must never sleep) along with chat and email support kept me up to date on what was happening and what I needed to do. An excellent choice if they service your area. Followup comments:
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DSL EXTREME
(31)
(43)
Sherman Oaks,Los Angeles,CA
$20 per month
AT&T
"DSL extreme has service reps available all of the time"
"The download speed was very slow and they always blamed the at&t line."
"Mediocre service but relatively decent customer support"
about 10 days
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DSLX great, but ATT leaves a lot to be desired