Rainbow broadband

Your name has been supplied to me as a reference for Rainbow Broadband.

I have a few questions regarding your use of network services in general and specifically your use of their services.

1. Does Rainbow provide any incentive to you or your enterprise for providing references about their product or company?

They do not provide any incentive or rewards to me or my company for providing references

2. What vendor were you using prior to Rainbow for broadband services?

Prior to Rainbow Broadband, we were using ABC Company. We had a total of two T1 lines, one for data and one for IP Phone system. Prior to that we were using DSL Business Class. We currently have one T1 line for redundancy and for failover. Rainbow Line is our primary.

3. How many data circuits (T1 equivalents) did you contract for with that vendor?

T1 being 1.5Mbs up/down... we currently have 15Mbs up/down, one 10Mb and one 5Mb circuit.

4. Why did you switch to Rainbow?

Two big factors that contributed were cost and customer service. Because we had good line of sight to a hub building in Times Square, we wanted to take advantage of the cheaper pricing that came with radio as oppose to the copper. The pricing plans from ABC were just outrageous and the service was spotty. I can also vouch that they have the worst customer service and getting a tech onsite the same day is near impossible. I have never had issues reaching a live person with Rainbow Broadband, and their techs are very knowledgeable and get back with an answer or a resolution within an hour at most.

5. How long have you been a Rainbow customer?

I believe we are coming towards 5 years of service. We started off with a 3Mb and have since expanded to 15Mb.

6. Rainbow has offered us a 10 Mb Duplex connection. What dimension connection is Rainbow providing your organization?

A 10Mb and a 5Mb

7. Can you tell me if you have any problems with connectivity during period of inclement weather?

I can honestly say I have not. My biggest concern was weather affecting connectivity with this type of technology. That’s why we kept a T1 line as a backup. We have no need to use our backup T1 line in over 5 years of being with Rainbow. The only time their service went down was during their scheduled maintenance or when they upgraded their routers.

8. Have you experienced any problems with connectivity, loss of service or degradation of service with this vendor (e.g., chronic outages, latency issues)? If so, can you elaborate?

We have a West Coast Office connected via a VPN Tunnel and employees in five countries that VPN in to get to our file server... it runs very well and I test the speed at least once a week. There is maybe one or two scheduled maintenance that they do per year which causes an outage, but they always give advanced notice and it’s never during business hours.

9. Does Rainbow provide proactive network monitoring services to address signal degradation or do you need to bring these issues to their attention before they are addressed?

They monitor the service very well. We had a situation where one of the ports on our IP Phone System was being exploited (we use Aastra), and they actually alerted us to the issue as our upload was maxed out. We brought the phone system down and corrected the problem, but if they didn’t notify us about it, we may not have known about it for hours.

10. How would you rate Rainbow customer service on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 being Unacceptable and 5 being Superior?

I would give them a solid 5 and would recommend them to any business where reliability and system uptime is key to productivity.

11. What are your normal business hours of operation (e.g., 8 hrs x 5 days x 52 weeks, 12 hrs x 5 days x 52 weeks, 24 hrs x 7 days per week x 52 weeks)?

My company produces Broadway and Off-Broadway Shows, but the bread and butter comes from merchandising. One of our bigger shows is Wicked the Musical, it’s playing in 5 countries and 2 national tours. As the IT director, I manage the in-house servers, workstations and our remote Point of Sale Systems. Our HQ “normal” business hours are 9:30am to 6:30pm, but we have performances and tours that run in Pacific, Central and Eastern Time, including weekends. I am basically on call 24/7 and our servers are accessed virtual 24 hours a day, whether it’s our operations in London, Australia, Germany or Japan. Because of the nature of what we do, blackberries and iPhones are utilized 24/7 and there are performances on holidays... we don’t really have “normal” business hours.

12. Is there any other information you feel would be advantageous for us to know prior to entering into a multi-year service contract with Rainbow, would you please share it with us?

Their people are really on top of their game. They are very knowledgeable in their craft. I would and I have recommended their services to virtually everyone I know that need a rock solid ISP and are looking to get as much bang for their buck.