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 Review by koam 
UPDATED: 48 days ago
member for 9.2 years, 3831 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Middlebury,Addison,VT
 $65 per month
 about 10 days
 "Friendly and responsive small-town customer service. Very nice people for the most part."
 "Slow speeds for 2009, very expensive, frequent severe slowdowns & occasional outages."
 "Typical monopoly power sits with the company and not the consumer...but they're working on it."
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Install Co-ordination:
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See UPDATES below.
Shoreham.net is from Shoreham Telephone in rural Vermont. They are the local phone company and I suppose we should be grateful that there is any kind of broadband here.
This DSL service has a maximum speed of 1200 Kpbs down (best case scenario). More frequently we get 600-900 speeds down. Frequently in recent months there are severe slowdowns that give us speeds of 50 - 500. Their published speed is 256 K / 128 K...shockingly low. Another reviewer says that they keep dialing that down, rather than up.
I moved here from suburban NY where, over the last decade,I had the excellent OOL and then had Verizon FIOS. Both were rock solid reliable and blazingly fast for me. I expected less here in Vermont, but not this much less.
See my test history: »/testhistory/186761/a7e62
Overall the speed is just not all that good. You can do things at 900 Kbps, but you cannot do a lot and streams and downloads can become a problem.
The customer service is friendly and fast. When there is an outage, they seem to care about it. Sometimes they claim that it's out of their hands due to a supplier issue...nevertheless, they do pay attention to the issue and communicate with me well about it. This is small town America and that is the upside of this company.
July 2009:
Today, a Sunday morning, I had a total outage. My neighbor was up and running. After trying to fix it myself for a couple of yours, I called their subcontracted 24/7 Tech support and tried for 2 more hours to get on - they tried everything to no avail. Their server was just not letting me on. I finally called Shoreham and left a voicemail at the office. I didn't get a callback (see below). A couple of hours later, I was able to connect. But it is working now. Total downtime was 1/2 day +.
MORE: They called me 7:30AM Monday morning to check. They had received my calls and trouble ticket yesterday. The problem was a bad card at their office and they pulled and replaced it on Sunday. Next time I'll leave them a voicemail before I call the 3rd party tech support. I'd note that this card issue has happened before as they've mentioned switching out bad cards several times to me.
Sometimes everything stops and I have to reboot my modem. Slow regular speeds continue, but not the major slowdowns at least in the past week.
The price is literally $50/month plus the cost of the local phone line of at least $15/month. I wouldn't even have the local POTS ( I use VOIP from another company) but the POTS is required to even get the DSL. So I am shelling out $65/month for the slowest broadband I've had in well over 10 years. What do I get on the POTS? Telemarketer calls and survey calls...just annoying. Every time those beggars and telemarketers call, I don't curse them, I curse Shoreham for publishing my number, even though I'm on all the DoNotCall lists and I never use the number for anything.
As you might suspect, my VOIP does not work well at these speeds. I basically have to stop all computer use in order to use the phone....and then hope for the best.
I hope they will upgrade the overall speed of the service and push their suppliers to reduce the frequency of slowdowns. (See UPDATE below)
Shoreham charged $50 for a replacement modem after the first one died due to lightning. They came and fixed it quickly.
UPDATE 7/21/09: This morning I got a call from the owner of Shoreham Tel. Like the rest of the staff, he was very nice and very professional. He was concerned about what speeds we're getting and said that we should expect a consistent 1 Meg where I'm located (we get that sometimes, but not always). He said that they expect to have a new DSLAM at the end of my road (a little over a mile) before winter and that we should be a good deal faster then. He said that everyone's set for 1.5 Meg max for fairness of coverage to all areas (close-in homes could be getting 4-5 Meg, but they are trying to make everyone equal (state regulatory?) and don't have tiered offerings) and that they were implementing new DSLAMs around the area. He said that at 1.5 M, that's about as fast as normal web sites serve up pages so that I should expect normal page-to-page web surfing to be as fast as I'd experience it on other ISPs (even faster ones). He said that the box near me had a shortage of voice ports currently (or something like that). I told him I'd keep a record of actual speeds and tracerts so that he could have a rich data set. We discussed what I may be able to do in my home to get rid of any dead ends on old phone lines that haven't been used for years. He said that my tracert hops should be around 30, not in the 40s as I have seen. Overall a good call and the kind of professional and courteous service that I have come to expect from Shoreham Tel. I'll keep the data set and follow up regarding whether they install our new DSLAM before winter and see how that impacts the numbers and report back here.
UPDATE 9/21/09 We still get big slowdowns. When more than one user is trying to do any download or streaming, the whole thing locks up.
Attachments: dslinfo.doc.zip 43,201 bytes
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Shoreham Telephone
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