The short answer is very bad
the long answer is....
I was a happy IT Manager in Toronto, my company's ISP was MCI, which was great for 3 years, but in the last 6 months I started to have performance issues, so after the third speed problem a spam phone call went thru so I ended talking with a Terago Networks sales rep.
they were kinda nice so I gave them a chance to come to my office and have a chat.
they came, they were cheaper than MCI but they were WIRELESS (Microwaves) ISP
after some back and forth I decided to give them an oportunity, so they send the quotation, we made some changes in the contract in order to protect my company (money wise) if Terago was not so reliable as they claimed.
we decided to go with them (WHAT A MISTAKE)
the tech came put the microwave antenna in the roof, did not work, he said that the antenna was defective and the next one will be ready in 24 hs, I waited, a new tech came with no antenna and said it was configuration issues, he managed to make the link work, he left.
I checked the equipment they put in my server room and the first thought I had was CHEAP stuff, a white plastic box that looks like those wireless ring bells for the houses and a very cheap with unknown brand switch . no router, nothing Cisco, nothing that I can have information of.
I let it go and said to myself as long as it works, I will be happy.
next weekend I worked in the ISP switch, from the new pool of IPs changed my DNS ip , made changes on my registar for my domains, replaced MCI secondary dns server for Terago 's , waited 1 day for DNS propagation and on saturday I decided to do the firewall changes using all the new Terago 's ips.
everything was fine , did speed test, speed was fine, left home.
Monday morning the nightmare started, people complained about MSN Messenger going on and off, I checked the firewall logs, and Terago was going on and off , so I called the help desk / noc
after 10 minutes waiting I spoke with a lady with strong Indian accent, I tried to explain to her what the situation was and how critical this was (first day, new ISP, etc.)
she said that she will create a ticket, I said fine, and she gave me the ticket number.
internet was on and off, emails were bouncing back, our SQL replication was reseting, big mess!
because we did not have any customer or demo I let Terago guys to work.
Tuesday, I sent an email to the infamous noc@terago.com but nobody replied, on Wednesday we had demos, customers coming over for meeting , Internet was needed, so I called again, I gave the ticket number and the person asked me, how can I help you, I explained that I switched to them, and for 2 days I didn't have any constant Internet, they said, ohh I see that, 1 second I will let you know the status, after 10 minutes, the help desk person said that Terago was having Interferences (Microwaves?) and they had to change the channel but they cannot do it until 7 pm because other customers were in the same zone, I asked him if the other customers were in the same situation, the Terago guy said YES, so I said, so why you want to keep all the customers in the zone with no internet until 7 pm... Silence, I asked to talk with his manager, which was busy (of course) and promised to call me.
At this point I decided to drag in the sales guys (Ted and Chris), they play it a they care and they even told me that they spoke with the director of operations and I don't remember what other bull crap.
I waited, no Internet, no manager's call, so I went home,
Thursday! Internet is OFF , I called, I asked what went wrong at 7 pm, they said that they changed the channel but the interference was also in the other channel, they also mentioned a new problem : "CAPACITY"
I asked why they did not verified the other channel before trying that "fix", silence again.
I changed my tone to an upset one, and I was able to talk with the Noc Manager.
he was rude, and he told me that they will change access points and equipment in their end, they can do it remotelly and they were working on that.
I ask for a phone call when the change was done ( never happened)
I sent an email to the sales guys (Ted and Chris) telling them that nothing change and please try to do something, never got an answer back from them (no email, no phone call)
Friday, Internet is down again, spoke with the NOC , they said that the problem was interference and 1 single customer who was using all the resources of the Terago Access Point and interference , at this point interference smelled a bull crap, anyways they decided to move that single customer to another zone and leave us (rest of the customers) alone, that change supposed to happen on Friday.
aroung noon on Friday, we got back Internet, fast and great, I even sent an email to the whole company asking for apologies and telling them that the problem was fixed.
I was ready to go home when Internet went down, called the noc, gave shit to whoever answered the phone, told him that for 5 days I haven't had Internet, gave my cellphone number and demanded a phone call.
Went home
Saturday morning, Internet was down, could not access to out website, or vpn or anything.
Called the NOC, waited in a loop for 15 minutes, no option to leave a message, so I sent an email.
My CEO called me and asked me for a status, which I did not had, let's see if he will fire me or not on Monday.
I was so frustrated that I decided to go to my office, of course Internet was down, I called again Terago, and someone answered , I explained the situation, he said I will contact my manager I will call you in 5'.
someone called me when driving a car, the noise was terrible, I explained the problem and told me that the sales guys told him that we decided to cancel the service and for that reason we did not get the new equipment.
at that poing I went nuts, and started to yell to the guy, because I never cancelled the service, I always wanted to make it work from day one and I was wasting my saturday in the office because of their shittie ISP.
they guy noticed that I was ready to have a heart attak so he said, I will send you a tech today, with a new antenna which uses NEW TECHNOLOGY? WTF!
I yelled a bit more and told him SEND THE MOFO NOW! at this point I decide the roll back the whole Terago Shit mess and go back to MCI
called the sales guy from my cell, so he could not know who I was and answer, which he did, I gave shit to him, he denied the cancellation shit, so I asked him to call everyone and help me, his answer was... today I have a wedding....So I said that I had a wedding too, but I was in the office because of his fucking crappy ISP!
I asked him to MOVE and close the phone.
At this point I called MCI, asked if we were still active with them, they said YES for 1 extra week.
Changed the DNS ip for the original one, changed my secondary DNS on all the registars, changed the DNS records, changed the firewall rules and after 4 hours everything was just as before the TERAGO NETWORKS MOFOS decided to take my company as customers.
when I finish with everything and was ready to test, the guy from Terago called me to tell me that a techinican was coming with an antenna, my answer was NEVER MIND, I DON'T WANT IT, AND BE READY FOR MY LAWYER!
So, if you are thinking about using Terago Netwoks, just don't.
they are not worthy, they are not serious, the sales guys are useless, the technical stuff non qualified to handle a 24/7 operation and the NOC manager should be fired because all this mess is his fault ( or better say his lack of solutions or ideas to fix a problem)
Avoid Terago at any cost.
11 comments:
Terago is known for redundency only and not a primary line, should have consulted your way through to weight your options. I don't know your office size, but when we moved buildings I looked at 3 - 4 ISP's and compared the qoutes at the sametime.
When I spoke to Terago, I demanded to have 2 statalites and each looking at diffrent hub sites to have redundant primary line (same price)and they were more than happy to do that. After some more research done, I came to a conclusion that Terago is good for backup ONLY and not a primary internet feed ( always stick with fibre lines )
I can see the frustration you had to go through and the poor excution on their end, but as an IT manager - you should'nt jump on something too quickly ESPACIALLY if it puts production on a thin line.
It's always good to see the other side, and I certianly hope they're not serious about taking this blog down, because you can counter sue and actually win.
Good luck
We use terago as our main & bell as a failover. We have not had any problems with terago...even if we did we dont notice it because of our redundancy.
At the same time we are located in the middle of nowhere so interference is not a big issue.
I can tell you one thing though! Terago support/account managers take forever to respond....the response time can exceed 48h. It's exteremly frustrating.
Terago`s service is so poor as to be ridiculous. No return calls, not enough capacity and rude representatives.
They should only be used as a last resort - when nothing else is available and never as a primary access service provider!!!
You`re better off with DSL!
It`s hard to believe that Terago is still in business. I made the mistake of signing up for their wireless service six months ago and all that that signature brought me is a bunch of headaches.
Customer service? They have none. No return calls, nothing but silence. SLAs? Forget about it. It`s always someone else`s problem. They even outsource their antenna installations to satellite dish installers!
They only have one employee in the province of Quebec!!!
Worst ISP ever!!
Actually, that's not true. You should check your facts before posting hearsay.
TeraGo has an office in Montreal with enough staff to service that city. There definitely is more then 1 employee in all of Quebec.
As a fairly large wholesale customer of Terago for the last few years, I couldn't agree more with this blog - it's been a terrible experience fraught with many long outages. The sales pitch described a network topology that turned out not to exist (at least in my area). There are many single points of failure, no redundancy, and the network is completely unsuitable for enterprise use. Unfortunately I'm stuck on a multi-year contract with a useless SLA.
Actually when Terago is working it is great. I have a couple of locations in Vancouver and Toronto. The problem is their so called customer service and email. It seems like both are outsourced. So you are effectively treated like an idiot when you call in because the CS person is using one of those yes/no trails and actually doesn't have a clue about anything. It took a week to get someone out to a failing radio. An email server in Vancouver quit working and it took many hours to get it fixed. Good for a backyard outfit from Calgary but definitely not a real service provider.
Terago service is horrible and their support is insulting. More accurately...TeraBlows!
You may be interested in other reviews at http://community.spiceworks.com/product/9124-terago
We have/had very poor service with Terago. Constant speed issues as well as total service drop out (on avg of 5 a week), some of that being weather related. It could be raining (not heavily) and service drops out, even though that state that it shouldn't at all, even with snow it should still be working.
Their customer care isn't all that great, there is much room for improvement.
I've placed many service calls over the last few years, many of those issues were at fault on their end (service issues, equipment failure and interference with the towers). One service call took about 20 hours to fix and it wasn't even a hardware failure, this is unacceptable!
Save yourself headaches and find another service provider.
Terago is so brutal. Their email spam filtering solution called greylisting will constantly block legit email addresses and they provide no way of whitelisting them. So when our customers would call us pissed off because they think we're blocking emails from them, Terago was expecting us to tell our customers to make sure they've configured their email system properly. Terago refuses to admit this is a major flaw. Also this greylisting they do will intentionaly put a delay on email delivery while their system learns that the sender address is legit. We're talking delays of up to 12 hours or more.
And don't get me started about their support. I have literally walked their suport people through troubleshooting steps in order to solve issues they were causing us. That is so bad. I also remeber one weekend we had to call them for an issue and we were told that the one guy that could fix the problem was out of reach until the following Monday. They had one guy that could restart a server to fix the issue?
The worst part is they don't seem to care about any of the complaints.
I found this blog because we too as a company are having terrible internet with Terango. and are stuck in a contract but after no way every again. stay away
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