Working With CitEscape
June 30, 2006

As some of you may have noticed while following my blog; we switched over to CitEscape recently at my office. I wanted to detail how it went, and how wonderfully citescape's been treating us.

After talking with Jesse Sams (their GM) on my blog and through e-mails for awhile (and having seen how terrible Charter had gotten) I decided to give Citescape a go at our offices here at $WeMakeLegalResearchSoftware. I figured, what the heck. Jesse was willing to allow us to sign up, get everything setup, and back out if the service wasn't what we were expecting. Only a little time lost on my part if things don't work out, right?

After talking with Jesse and getting everything setup, Jesse let us know upfront that they were experiencing bandwidth issues and were already at their maximum for their subscriber base. He told us to wait a little bit, and he'd get us hooked up as soon as their new line was put in - so that they would be able to service us properly. Wow, a company who cares about providing the service they describe to their customers.

Fast forward a few weeks. The installation and testing took a little longer than Jesse had expected/told us, and we were getting antsy. I finally got the message from Jesse that installation was going to go ahead. Great! This was right after Charter murdered one of their main routers again.

Sometime that morning their technician's showed up and started mucking about on the roof. Our office is in a condominium style situation, so there's a management station onsite and we are not the only tenants. Loe, but did the secretary at the management station cry out; "Get down from that yonder roof!". Long story short, they had to scramble and regroup while someone else in our building (who was also signing up for service with Citescape) argued with the management. Luckily, the other individual managed to convince them to allow the installation (as nothing was getting mounted directly to the roof).

So, Citescape returns the next day and begins installation again. Avast! More problems! The subscriber module they had purchased was malfunctioning, and they were again forced to disappear to order a new one.

A few days later, they returned. This time the SM worked! Wonderful! Citescape's technicians mounted the hardware, and ran all the cabling (through the dropped ceilings) into our office and plunked it down right by our router.

Thankfully, the technician hooked the cable up to his laptop (An Apple!) and plugged away, making sure it work. We then got the cabling hooked into our firewall, and everything worked perfectly. Great!

All was not well though. After Citescape's technicians had gone home we noticed dropped connections occuring with alarming frequency. I ran traceroute's and determined that the dropped connections were directly related to their own gateway, and dropped Jesse a line about it.

Jesse responded promptly, and within the next day he had dispatched his technicians to look into the problem. The technicians arrived, and they instantly began checking out their equipment. Note, they began checking out their equipment. This is where Citescape began to diverge completely from other companies. The first thing they did was look at their equipment, not tell us to "reboot our computer and call them in the morning". Nice!

So, they determine that the antenna was improperly (physically) configured and went onto the roof to swap stuff around - and hoped that they had fixed the problem.

Sadly, the next day connections started dropping again. I was getting miffed, my users were getting miffed, and stuff just wasn't going right. I let Jesse know - and that same day he delivered more technicians to my doorstep.

Thankfully, they had somehow managed to secure a better location on a nearby building to place their SM - which had a direct line of sight to their own broadcasting tower and had hoped it would provide better connections.

On top of the fewer drops, Citescape managed to coax out a huge amount more bandwidth for us than we were initially signed up for. We're now managing 4Mbp/sDown and 1.5Mbp/sUp; which provides more than enough consolation for the initial problems with setup.

So, how's the service you ask? The actual ISP end of it? It's amazing. Citescape is a wonderful ISP who gets you onto the internet, and then gets the hell out of the way. Port filtering? None. I was able to download the latest Ubuntu release at full tilt thanks to the joys of BitTorrent. Traffic shaping? None. I've observed steady net speeds of 4/1.5 with no issues. Amazing.

Summing it up. We got off to a rocky start with Citescape, but they've truly pulled through with both their superb customer service and their amazing abilities as an ISP. Here's to hoping they stay the same as they grow!

(CitEscape is a St. Cloud, MN area "wireless" ISP using Motorla's Canopy broadcasting system to get to their main data connection)