I received this request about Covad today. This was in response to recent article. I feel like the Jim Cramer of VoIP
Here is the question and answer:
Question:
Mr. Tehrani,
I just finished reading you article, “Best VoIP Investments of 2005“ (published in February 2005) and noticed you didn’t make mention of COVAD Communications. The article seemed to focus more on smaller companies that were marketing specific, niche-type capabilities, as well as peer-to-peer technology, and perhaps that’s why COVAD was not mentioned. Regardless, I would be very much interested in your thoughts about COVAD and its prospects for growth/success over the next couple of years. In general, what are your thoughts on the prospects of VoIP technology and services in the near future?
I realize you probably entertain thousands of questions from your readership, but I would really appreciate a response, time permitting.
Name and address withheld by request.
Answer:
I am not enough of an expert on Covad’s day to day operations to intelligently give you analysis on this company. The space Covad occupies is going to grow significantly. Covad is doing a great job marketing and I like the movie that they are running for what it is worth. I don’t know what is going on behind the scenes at Covad however. I hear their sales reps are being very aggressive in the NYC area. I will blog more comments as I hear anything or meet with the company.
Covad Investment
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I would be very wary of COVAD from both an investment and user perspective. Our company, 2 locations with over 100 users moved to COVAD's hosted PBXi solution in Oct 05. We have not gone a single day without some type of service issue, and have had multiple complete outages. Fortunately we only signed a one year contract. The support is dismal, and while they promise to fix problems, at best they provide a patch that only works for a short time. The COVAD sales VP that we were working with resigned because of the problems that they are experiencing and his supervisor has also resigned because of these service issues. He told me that when they questioned the support arm of COVAD they were told to focus on selling new customer and not to worry about existing customers. In addition he told me that COVAD is completely overwhelmed as they oversold their capacity. This has definitely adversely affected our business and we are in the process of moving to a different service and accept the ensuing litigation for breaking the contract early rather than live with this service. This service is a complete failure.
Thanks for the feedback. I know of a number of very happy Covad customers as well but would be interested to hear how others feel about the service.
What type of service issues have you had? Is it a VoIP quality issue? DSL?
Same exact issues - Covad VoIP service is awful, awful, awful. Good when it works which is only every other day. They have no right to be peddaling this crap. Funny thing is you can't find much negative out there, but belive me, we are one of thousands of customers screwed by their decision.
Telekenex Announces Painless Migration Program for Covad VoIP Customers
Program Includes Free Installation and Up To 4 Months of Free Service
Telekenex will offer free programming and reconfiguration of customer-owned Cisco premise equipment and grant up to four (4) FREE months of monthly service. In addition, certain Covad customers who transition to Telekenex will also find many choices for their local access and Internet connections including Telekenex’s award winning Managed Ethernet (ME), which provides a 5 Mbps connection for the same price as an average 1.5 Mbps connection (T1).
Please email me for more info.
Aaron Kanahele
akanahele (at) telekenex . com