Sling Broadband is a dishonest, unprofessional company. They claim to be a WIMAX company in South Florida. And Sling Broadband is literally the most dishonest company I have ever interacted with. The CEO of Sling Broadband is Addiel Lopez. I really can’t even think of any company that comes close. I mean, I think that if they were a used car dealer, they wouldn’t just be overcharging you for a car or anything that typical. I think they would be doing stuff like putting Mercedes logos on an old Toyota and telling you it’s a new Mercedes. They’re at a pretty high level of dishonesty and probably entering into flat-out fraud.

If you are considering Sling Broadband, I strongly recommend that you keep looking. You really don’t want to give them your business. If you’re lucky enough to be able to get Towerstream, they are a much more professional and decent WIMAX company. If you don’t need WIMAX, consider AT&T, or Speakeasy, or Comcast Business. Anything but Sling Broadband. Take my advice, you won’t be sorry. Want to know how much Sling Broadband sucks? Keep reading.

Every single sentence I write here is true, so there’s really nothing that Sling can say or do about it. I’m not just criticizing them or making stuff up, and I don’t have any agenda other than to tell people that are thinking of signing up with Sling Broadband the truth about this company. Consider this a public service announcement. You aren’t going to believe the nerve of these people.

Here’s the story:
As an IT consultant, I am always working with different Internet carriers. I’m a Microsoft partner,
a Certified Microsoft Professional, a Speakeasy partner, a Cisco partner, a Rackspace partner, an Ingram Micro partner, McAfee partner, etc. Basically I partner with whatever company I do business with. Being a partner almost always brings benefits to the client, either directly or indirectly. For example, being a Microsoft Partner give me access to 24/7 support for business-critical issues. Being a Kerio partner lets me offer up to a 15% discount to my clients, etc.

When I had a client that could not get Towerstream, I looked at other WIMAX carriers. Sling Broadband was the only WIMAX company that could offer service. I was reluctant to work with them initially, because of all the typos on their website. (They can’t spell “guarantee” or “equipment”, stuff like that.) They seemed unprofessional for that reason. But I thought, it’s Miami…maybe they are a really great company, just not native English speakers. I can still give them a chance. So I joined their partner program, quoted their service, and it was approved and ordered.

A salesguy named JP sent me an email. I replied back and got this error message:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mxgate2.biznesshosting.com.
I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

So I had a Cisco 7940 in SCCP (AKA “Skinny”) mode.
In other words, the Cisco 7940 VOIP phone that came with the default Cisco software image.
We wanted to make it work with SIP protocol. Easy enough. Just go to www.cisco.com and download
the software, right? After all, the phone was purchased recently. Just download the software.

But no.

Getting the software for the phone was the most difficult part. But after much searching, guess what turned up? A whole pack of software images for the 7900 series phones. Amazing.

Of course, it was still a bit of a chore to upgrade:
1) Make a TFTP server on your computer. I used my Macbook. Airport was connected to the Internet. I set the Ethernet port to a private IP (192.168.1.25) and plugged the phone in with an Ethernet cable. Then turned on Internet sharing in System Preferences.  Scrolled down on the phone to Unlock Config and put the password (default is probably “cisco”). Set the TFTP server address. Rebooted the phone. Still not working.

2) The files that it wants are tricky. You can unzip one of the images, say P0S3-08-8-00.zip which is fairly recent. This will have the .bin file that has the image, plus a TXT file that specifies the image version, a .loads file, an .sb2 file, and an .sbn file. You would think this would be enough, put them in the TFTP server. But no. You’re not even close to finished. You’re going to need a file that looks like SIP(phone mac address).cnf…otherwise known as the SIP Generic Configuration…stuff like your SIP username and password etc…, plus XMLDefault.cnf…that’s the one that really loads the image…, and maybe dialplan.xml. And that XMLDefault.cnf file? You might have to append a .xml at the end.

The XMLDefault.cnf.xml file will look something like this:

<Default>

<callManagerGroup>

<members>

<member priority=”0″>

<callManager>

<ports>

<ethernetPhonePort>2000</ethernetPhonePort>

<mgcpPorts>

<listen>2427</listen>

<keepAlive>2428</keepAlive>

</mgcpPorts>

</ports>

<processNodeName>192.168.1.25</processNodeName>

</callManager>

</member>

</members>

</callManagerGroup>

<loadInformation30007 model=”CP-7912″>CP7912080000SIP060111A</loadInformation30$

<loadInformation8 model=”CP-7940″>P003-08-8-00</loadInformation8>

I got a flyer in the mail on Tuesday advertising AT&T U-verse, the new (for this area anyway) high-speed Internet and digital TV bundled service. I called them the same day to order. They had available for installs the following morning, or 2 weeks later. I asked for the following morning. 

At 8am, right on time, an AT&T woman came to the door and wanted to look at our phone wiring.
They apparently have to tweak it in some way to make sure it can deliver the higher-speed DSL service of U-verse, which is up to 18mb download and 1.5mb upload. She looked at a few jacks and fiddled with the cables and announced that she was done. Then at around 9am a guy in a U-verse truck showed up to complete the install. This is where it gets interesting.

I had ordered the IPN4320 which has apparently a 320gb hard drive for DVR recording purposes. The installer realized he didn’t actually bring this box with him. He had to go back to his warehouse and get one. This took over 2 hours. By the time he came back, I had to leave the house. He did agree to come back later the same day.

He was going to be back at 5. Then at 6. Then he came at around 7pm with the right box. We connected all the equipment…I say “we”…but the box did not come up. He explained that the new box is a high-capacity hard drive (according to AT&T 320gb is “high-capacity”) and said that they had a lot of trouble with the orders. I wanted to look at the cables, maybe try the coax instead of the CAT5 cable I had plugged in. He glanced at it and said the cables were fine, it was the order was probably wrong. 

He called the “Tier 2″ support for help. They wanted to try using the low-capacity hard drive. So they deleted the order, created an order for the other box and plugged it in. Which is when the installer realized that I had plugged the Ethernet cable for the DVR into the port labelled “Broadband”. See, the U-verse DVR has 4 jacks for Local Ethernet and 1 orange one labelled “Broadband.” So I thought that the LAN stuff goes in the 4 ports, and the WAN goes in the WAN port. Logical, right? But incorrect. Turns out that all the U-verse Ethernet cables have to go into the LAN ports. The port labelled “Broadband” is not normally used. It’s for if you don’t want an RJ-11 cable delivering service, but you want a CAT5 cable coming from the phone box to your house. 

Ok, so they saw the mistake. They asked me if I wanted to leave the low-capacity box, or put the high-capacity one. I said I preferred the high-capacity one I ordered. So the Tier 2 guy deleted my order again,and went to create a new one. About 20 minutes went by. Then he announced that his computer had frozen and he could not complete the order. It would have to wait until the next day. 

I called them at 8am the next day. They entered a new order. And they kept telling me that an installer would come out in 4 weeks with equipment. I had to keep explaining that the equipment was already setup. So they said it was all fixed. But the service was not working. I kept getting transferred to different departments.

The flyer said to call 1-877-356-5177. And they told me to call 1-800-288-2020. And when they asked me where I was and I said “Miami” they told me to call 1-800-234-6852. And when they found out that it was not Miami, Ohio but Miami, Florida, they told me to call 1-800-288-2020 again. I got transferred to a Spanish-language-only repair center for residential customers. Who transferred me to an English high-speed Internet department. Who found out I had U-verse and transferred me again. I hung up and called the installer who told me I had to call 1-866-446-4115. At this point I had to leave the house.

I got back at about 8 or 9pm. I was told that the U-verse tech support was 24/7. And technically it is. But tech support said that they didn’t have the same system or tools as the Sales department and that only Sales could help me, and they were closed after 7pm. All they needed to do was look at the order, but Tech Support and Sales are on 2 different platforms. 

So the next morning the installer sent me a text message that he was working on my issue. He somehow managed to get a Tier 2 tech support person to get my account corrected. It turned out that the person who placed my most recent order put an install date of March 10th. 

Then a guy comes and knocks on my door. He’s a U-verse installer and he has a DVR box and wants to install my “new service.” I’m on the phone with AT&T Tier 2 support already. I laugh. The new installer comes in the house to listen to the phone call and see if we can get it working. 

It took the Tier 2 guy about 45 minutes to place the order. He kept insisting that I must have 2 DVR boxes and 2 televisions. I tell him I only have 1. He keeps telling me that he sees 2 in his system and I must have 2. I tell him there is only the 1 DVR. Eventually he deletes everything and readds it and the service starts working.

I learned that Tier 2 has a direct phone number but they have a weekly code that you need to talk to them.
The AT&T Tier 2 phone number is 1-877-293-9986 

The codes for this week and next are:

3449
9764
7083

They need to keep people from calling them directly because AT&T wants to funnel people through their Tier 1 support. Which unfortunately seems to be staffed entirely by angry people who did not graduate high-school. You can call those people at any time (as long as it’s before 7pm EST) at the above numbers,
and you just have to navigate complicated autoattendant menus and long hold times. But if you want Tier 2, it’s carefully protected since those are the only people who know what they are doing.

Go figure.

So now the download speed is about 12mb and the upload is 1.5mb. 
The digital TV has hundreds and hundreds of channels. They all look a little washed-out
compared to cable, even on a 1080p high-definition monitor. But whatever. 

The speed is twice as fast as the best DSL. And faster than Comcast cable.
It’s a mystery why Google Maps loads very slowly and wants to use HTML instead,
if you’re using DSL or even U-verse.  
The service is absolutely confusing and nightmarish. So if you get it working, great.
But it’s not fun getting there.

For our Residential readers in South Florida, AT&T (formerly Bellsouth) is running a current promotion: sign up for their FastAccess DSL and get a $125 Visa gift card 6 to 8 weeks later. In the AT&T stores, they tell you that it’s a month-to-month contract. (But the paperwork says it’s a 24-month contract.) Their highest speed is “DSL Xtreme 6.0″ which is meant to have a download of 6mb/sec and upload of 512kb/sec. Here is a screenshot of the download speed using speedtest.net in Miami, Florida. It’s pretty close to their advertised speeds:

Comcast is running their own promotion: sign up for their Internet, VOIP phone, and digital movie package, and get a $200 gift card. The Comcast speeds are confusing: where they mention “PowerBoost” and say that you can get download speeds of up to 12mb/sec or 16mb/sec, what they mean is that they are selling 6mb/sec and 8mb/sec connections that will download single files at double that speed…for up to 30 seconds only. The connections are really 6mb or 8mb.  Here is a screenshot of their 8mb circuit using the same test server at roughly the same time. Notice the relatively large upload bandwidth:

So anyway, the DSL from AT&T/Bellsouth costs about $45 a month. The Comcast circuit costs about $50 a month. Here’s another factor: it took no fewer than 9 phone calls to get the AT&T connection provisioned correctly, through about 5 different departments, and about 3 hours total on the phone. It took 1 phone call to Comcast and about 10 minutes on the phone to get the 8mb circuit. 

I want to like AT&T, but their customer service is poor and their bandwidth just doesn’t really compete with cable, so I have to come down on the side of Comcast.

AT&T are meant to have a service called U-Verse that provides 18mb circuit plus digital television streaming and VOIP, but it’s not available everywhere. Some parts of Florida, I don’t think metro Miami has U-Verse yet although they’re working on it. For now, it seems Comcast is still the big residential player. (That’s until Verizon rolls out FIOS in South Florida, if and when that happens. Apparently they have it available everywhere except the largest cities in the state, for some reason. 20mb circuits for the price of Comcast’s 8mb circuit? And 50mb circuits if you’re willing to pay a bit extra? Yes please.)

So today I switched a client over to Mosso hosting for email and web hosting.
And installed the drivers for an AT&T USB HSPA modem for another client.

And took apart a faulty Macbook G4 for another client. There is an issue where the mouse freezes up on the Macbook at random times. It seems to be a faulty trackpad. When I unplug the trackpad from underneath the keyboard, no problems. Except that you can’t install OS X 10.5 Leopard directly onto it for some reason known only to Apple. You have to start with 10.2 Jaguar or something like that, then upgrade to Leopard. To try to install directly means you get a kernel panic with cryptic messages.

I’m putting MX Logic Email Defense up today for my own domain.
I strongly recommend their platform as the most accurate spam filter available.
And spam is growing exponentially: 

Spam levels have recovered from the November takedown of Internet Service Provider McColo with vigor and are set to be at pre-McColo levels over the next month, a Google Message Security report found.

Since November, spam has continued to grow 156 percent. And in light of spam’s rapid upward growth, experts at Google Message Security, powered by Postini, anticipate that spam is likely to reach pre-McColo levels within the next three to five weeks.

Be careful what you install:

Internet security firm Intego said on Thursday that it has discovered a new Trojan horse in pirated copies of Apple’s iWork ‘09 productivity software that could allow an attacker to take control of the infected computer.

The Trojan horse, OSX.Trojan.iServices.A, discovered circulating in copies of the software on BitTorrent trackers and other pirate sites, is rated serious, according to Intego’s security alert.

When iWork is installed, the Trojan is installed as a start-up item as a part of iWorkServices. It has read-write-execute permissions for root control of the computer, Intego said. The malware connects to a remote server over the Internet and may download additional components to the infected computer.

As of early Thursday, at least 20,000 people had downloaded the iWork ‘09 installer, according to Intego.

Meanwhile, an Italian researcher has uncovered a way to inject malicious code into memory of OS X-based computers, which would enable attackers to easily hide their activities, according to The Register.