Monkeybrains

UPDATE: after seeing my review, they contacted me, apologized and closed the issue.
We wanted to stay with a local business but not being able to access the internet several times a day, and not having support on the weekend, at least Saturday, when the internet is down for the whole weekend made it impossible for us to continue with them. I wish them luck though.
We ‘ve had such bad connection with them. We had to call many times until someone came to the house to check. After the visit nothing has changed and we could not get a hold of them afterwards. We had been with Monkeybrains for a few years and the bad connection started about a year ago.
We switched provider and now we have a perfect connection.
Since November they have been sending me bills that I now owe $ 140. We dont even use their service anymore. I sent them numerous emails to let them know that we switched and to have someone take the antena off the roof.
2 stars because it is cheap compared to other providers. I guess you get what you pay for.

Five stars for service, two stars for the actual internet you get, then another five stars for the price. I settled on a three, which is harsh but realistic.
I got sick of Comcast, and I switched. Comcast being bad and dishonest is really the only reason to go with Monkeybrains. I’m happy enough with Monkeybrains. But during hi demand hours, the wifi speeds just don’t cut it (4−8mbps). The speeds are five times faster during the day, and in the middle of the night (20mbps) when nobody is online anywhere. And if you live alone, actually, 4 – 8 is fine.
For $ 35 per month it is a deal over time – you will save mega bucks, because no matter what you do, you always end up – at least I do – spending a fortune every month. Their deals are lies. With Monkeybrains, it’s an idiot bill each month, for $ 35. You must have your own router, and this is where the speed issues get super slow – converting the connection from hardwire to wifi. Huge drops in speed with routers. Why? I don’t know. It wasn’t like that with Comcast and Sonic. A direct plug in to the box is always nice and fast. With the router, seldom fast. I have a NetGear router that cost $ 300, and it worked fine with other services. I tried a brand new Airport Extreme, and it wasn’t any better.
I have tried all the services – Comcast (evil), Sonic (nice, but crappy product), and AT&T (evil and crappy product). I’m staying with monkey brains till someone invents something else, or Bernie Sanders takes over as CEO of Comcast after he loses to Hillary. Then I’d go back to Comcast. Otherwise, they’re evil.
So if you are streaming movies, you might locate the black Monkey brains box near the TV, so you can plug in ethernet cable directly to the router, then another ethernet cable directly into the rook/​apple tv/​amazon fire or whatever you stream your tv on, and avoid wifi – in other words, all hardwired. Then the only slowness will show up when you’re using wifi.
The reason to use Monkey brains is if you don’t want Comcast and if you aren’t watching cable TV and have converted to streaming everything. And that’s reason enough. Monkey brains has no hidden rental fees for hardware (Sonic!) no crazy interstate taxes and hidden contracts (Comcast!), and like Gertrude Stein told Alice as they sat in bed watching «the Affair» on the Shotime app, «Alice, $ 35 is $ 35 is $ 35.»
The people at Monkeybrains are human and nice, but the star rating here should be more about the actual product, and less about the people. When you pay that $ 250, you never really know what you’re getting till they plug it up. It ought to be a solid 20+ mbps or more from my house – I’m a tall building in the Mission with zero interference. But it isn’t. Others have higher speeds. I don’t know why I don’t either.
It works for our family. I’m sticking with it. It will never work as well as Comcast *when Comcast is working, which is hardly ever, especially on Sunday nights when everybody is watching tv and streaming movies, and I hate them. So I’m with Monkeybrains.

Signed up online in December. I filled in the survey form and was scheduled for an install in early January. Install consisted of mounting a microwave antenna on our roof and running a cable into our apt. Took about an hour. No issues.
We’re getting about 40−60Mbps consistently for the last two weeks. $ 35/​month is a screaming good deal. We’re very happy to have ditched Comcast. Thanks Monkeybrains!

Used to be awesome — had them for both home and downtown biz. Biz was great but pricey, but over the three years we noticed increasing brief lapses in service. Home went from 30 Mbps down /​30 Mbps up when first installed to usually ⁸⁄₃. Thinking it was the router I directly connected their wire to my computer — still ⁸⁄₃. Better than dial up :) During the day we’ll get 20/​20, but at night it now goes to as low as ²⁄₂. — I suspect they oversubscribed their service to make more money. Sadly I just signed up for Comcast — their guaranteed 75 down ends up being cheaper than MB. (and it’s month-​to-​month and not a promotional contract). BTW, the MB people are incredibly nice — so much better than Comcast. Comcast tested speed is 85 down and 6 up.
(ha ha — within five seconds of posting the update about their service went down)

These guys are terrific. The connection is fast. And, importantly, their service is fantastic. The service person was very knowledgeable, intelligent, courteous and on time. Problem solved. We are impressed and totally satisfied with Monkeybrains.

Monkeybrains is literally the greatest internet service provider i have ever used. They came to my apartment to install everything when they said they would, they were super friendly, quick and efficient! I think they had everything up and running in about 15 minutes. I will never use Comcast or AT&T ever again. My internet is so fast and I haven’t had any problems! Thanks guys!

Yea it’s cheap but there’s an old saying. «You get what you pay for.» If you want fast reliable service, go with a bigger company. If you’re okay with mediocre service and varying speeds (peak/​non peak hours), They’re excellent for the price.

In January of 2012 we bid adieu to the beast that is Comcast and signed up for MonkeyBrains. We’ve never looked back. Can’t believe I haven’t written a review since I’ve been reviewing away on their high speed connection ever since.
Sign up was super low key, just a simple email to relay the slope of our roof and whether we’d obtained landlord permission to put up antenna. The installation fee more than pays for itself when you start paying $ 35 a month for internet and you just chuckle when your friends relay what they shell out for the craptastic service that is Comcast. Plus I kinda love the small biz feel of using paypal for recurring billing.
Worried about a small mom and pop and what kind of service you get? Don’t be. These folks are ON TOP of any issues (i.e. immediate twitter replies when something is amiss, and real time tweets with any service outages or planned work). Case in point, today our internet wasn’t working and my husband sent them a tweet. Soon after, he got a phone call where someone diagnosed the problem and (Comcast customers, don’t faint from shock when I tell you this) a technician was at our door in 20 minutes. Fast forward to Devin on the roof, in the fricken rain, fixing the problem (apparently our install included a defective wire that had actually been recalled). He replaced the faulty wire and even went back out there a second time to make sure everything was perfect. Above and Beyond.
Give Comcast the boot and go with the little guy. You won’t regret it.

Updated TLDR: Monkeybrains definitely redeemed themselves. As a small outfit, their support and CRM processes are still a little rough around the edges which is probably why the issue happened in the first place, but we are now very happy Monkeybrains customers.

Pretty good service overall

I’m so disappointed with Monkeybrains… Terrible, terrible customer service, and outages almost every day, sometimes lasting for days. No follow up, no information, no call back when you leave a voicemail. I sometimes work from home in the morning but can’t anymore because I can’t rely on internet service. It gets excruciatingly slow or just stops working altogether in the middle of online meetings.
And maybe they should answer people’s questions on twitter instead of retweeting stupid stuff!

We’ve been customers with Monkeybrains since May 2010, relatively early in their wireless mesh pilot. I recall being so optimistic about working with this local business back then.
Unfortunately, my impression is they hasn’t scaled gracefully as their popularity has surged over the years. The aspect of their service that ultimately pushed me to change ISPs is their poor handling of weekend outages.
Nearly all the recent outages we’ve experienced have been on the weekend and on each occasion it’s been several hours before we’ve received any sort of response from Monkeybrains; this after trying to contact them via the phone, email and on Twitter.
The most recent one was the worst. I noticed our connection was offline at around 7am on Sunday. After around 6 hours of familiar radio silence, I receive a terse tweet referring me to their outage map. This suggested our downtime was due to a PG&E outage in Bernal Heights (we live in the Mission and were one of only 3 buildings down in our area). After they tweeted saying they were back online, I tweeted back several times saying our connection was still down. No response at all.
Later that event, I was at my wits end (while soothing our 3 week old baby) so I finally texted Alex, one of the founders. He said they’d send a tech out in the next day or two since it looked to be a problem with our antenna.
A tech did eventually come out the next evening and fix the issue (32+ hours later), but commented that he couldn’t check the antenna our roof for OSHA reasons. Apparently their approach to antenna installation in 2010 wasn’t quite up to safety standards today?
In any case, here’s the thing — nearly *all* our internet usage is outside conventional business hours. This dramatically magnifies the impact of weekend outages with no/​poor weekend support.
So, with a heavy heart, I’ve just cancelled our account with Monkeybrains. They’re a local business I really wanted to love.
I wish Alex, Rudy and rest of the crew at Monkeybrains all the best. And thanks Luis from billing for keeping our cancellation amicable and smooth. Perhaps we’ll check back in a couple of years to see if your approach to support has matured.

I’ve been a Monkeybrains customer since February 2013, and it has been an uneventful experience (which is good!). It’s a very reliable connection — I’ve only experienced maybe 3 – 4 very short outages (minutes, not hours) over my entire time as a customer. They explain their outages on their Twitter feed, and the service is usually back up before you notice. The speed is great for my needs. They advertise 8 – 20 Mbps on their website. It’s usually in the high end of that range, and it’s often above 20 Mbps in my speedtests. For that, you pay a very fair $ 35/​mo.
If you’re tired of all the BS with Comcast and AT&T and you want to work with a local business, Monkeybrains is the way to go. If you’re in their service area, just do it. You’ll be glad you did.

Update on my review. Monkey brains took care of me and my service. Now I run anywhere from 8−16mbps instead of 6−8mbps. Hard wired would be double that but I only use wifi since I’m on MacBook Air.
They credited me for my service for the inconvenience and is sending a coupon for a free Philz coffee. :)
Monkey Brains did what they could to assist me and went above my expectations on their customer service.
Thank you Becky in Billings and the lady who helped set up my tech service. I’m sorry I do not remember your name.

Good value, but occasionally spotty service.

They have for the most part been perfect. Ironically when I went to write this review, their service was down for the first time in 3 months.
Good friendly service, ridiculously fast Internet speeds, and mostly reliable.
Also $ 35/​month for Internet service. That’s a good deal.

I just had leave a review after I got my bill. Got the service mid April. Only billed me since the start of May. Excellent service throughout. Never experienced any down time. Very clean and quick installation. The technician was able to remove the Comcast cable (yuck) and just run the wire through the pre existing hole. In and out and up and running within 2 hours. Cannot speak highly enough of this great great company!!!
Update: In recent times the average speeds have dropped significantly in the Glenn Park area. Very inconsistent. Jumping from anywhere between 25mbps to less than 5mbps. My guess is its averaging 8 or 9mbps. I know SOMA and Mission are the main areas of focus, but hopefully not at the cost of surround areas. I still respect the company and service they are providing, just sucks that the quality has dropped so short after installation.

Excellent internet service. I never had a problem. Best of all was my cancellation experience.
I don’t need Internet at my office space because I have my set-​up at home now. When I called them to cancel it took all of 60 seconds…“I wanna cancel”…“great, you’re cancelled!” No squeezing me for one more month, no hoops to jump through. Ethical, fair-​minded businesses deserve 5 stars.

We have used Monkeybrains for just over a year now.
Pluses and minuses compared to Comcast (our previous provider):
— Monkeybrains has much faster download and upload speeds when compared to Comcast. *Noticeably* faster. We pretty regularly got around 10 mbps with Comcast (but it was often slower); we almost always get around 30 mbps (and it’s often faster) with Monkeybrains.
— The price is approximately the same for the first 8 or 9 months if you factor in that you have to pay off the $ 250 installation fee that Monkeybrains charges you up front.
— After that, the price is way lower than Comcast. When compared to Comcast’s business plans (
) Monkeybrains is half the cost for service that is twice the speed.
— We had three (two short, one longer) outages this year with Monkeybrains. Typical for Comcast was maybe once a year. So Comcast had fewer outages.
— Monkeybrains speeds are more reliably fast. The thing that really drove me to look for another provider was the fact that Comcast service slowed way down in our area during times of peak usage. It happened often. I have not experienced the slowdowns with Monkeybrains.
— Customer service through Monkeybrains is via Twitter; that’s not the greatest. You can at least call Comcast (but the people who help you are usually not all that good).
— Comcast tries to force a lot of needless extras on you ($ 20 a month phone service, $ 8 a month equipment rental, triple play deals that skyrocket after the first year). If you know what you’re doing, you can get rid of the extras but I suspect most people just take the path of least resistance and accede to the fees. It’s a hassle. And then there are all the add-​on fees and taxes that Comcast heaps on you. Nothing like that with Monkeybrains; $ 35 per month is $ 35.
All in all, I’m much happier with Monkeybrains than I was with Comcast, despite the big fee upfront and my need to learn how to configure a VoiP phone system. Now that we’re though the initial setup period, I hope Monkeybrains will continue to deliver our Internet connection happiness.

I work as an IT consultant for small and medium businesses around the Bay Area. When my clients ask me where to get fast cheap internet, I tell them to call Comcast. When they’re ready to get serious, and they need a really fast internet connection, with reliable uptime, stellar customer service, and guaranteed bandwidth, it’s all about Monkeybrains. These guys are awesome.
Tech speak for nerds like me: Monkeybrains have fiber connections in several buildings in SF, connecting to a very fast internet trunk. From buildings that are connected to their network, they install line-​of-​site microwave dishes on the roof to extend their reach to other buildings. The result is blazing fast connectivity for their customers. I have several customers using Monkeybrains and they get great speeds (25, 50, or 100 megabit contracted, and often bursts significantly faster than the contracted speed). Acknowledging a very limited sample size, my clients on Monkeybrains get greater than 99.99% uptime, meaning less than 53 minutes of downtime per year.
For excellent connectivity in SF, I would never hesitate to direct my clients to Rudy and Anders over at Monkeybrains. Their business internet is not cheap, but you get what you pay for.