Complaint Review: Sonicwall Christian Bowyer 602.458.0709

I called sales at Sonic Wall about a year ago and spent at least 1/2 hour - 45 minuts on the phone with them discussing my needs for a high powered firewall-- one that could support at least 30-50Mbs download speeds. I told them that i didn't want to spend a fortune because i was only using on a small gigabit network and a VPN tunnel. As it turned out, the person i spoke with there obviously had little or no knowledge of the products or was a trainee. Anyway, he recommended a TZ170 and assured me it would suit my needs perfectly. I explained that I was using this device on a Macintosh network and speed was of the essence.

I acquired the device thru a retailer that was selling it quite a bit cheaper than the company was. After I acquired the device then proceeded to sell me a $150 service contract and registration, this included antispyware, anti-intrusion, antivirus, etc. the entire bundle including a $150/year service contract 24/7/365 in case i had any problems.

I had nothing but problems. The first one being that the TZ170 can't support more than 8Mb/s with all their extras running so my download speed was less than 25% of what it should have been. Everytime i called tech support (in india of course), all they had to say was "they sold you the wrong firewall." Instead, each service call took 2-3 hours of my time and ended up with the my ultimately having to disable all the "extras" they sold me, some of which didn't even work on a Mac in order to get my speed back.

After doing that dance about 10 times, i called christian bowyer, sales manager in the US of New England. He told me i needed a much more expensive piece of equipment than I was advised to purchase, and that every tech i spoke with knew that right from the start. So he basically said that with everything turned off, i might as well be using a $35 Netgear. I asked him why then did they waste 2-3 hours of my time with each service call when it could have ended in 60 seconds. He had no answer. but he gave me his number and told me he'd be back in touch with me within 2 days and see what sort of arrangement we could make. That was 2 months ago and i've yet to hear from him.

I paid almost $400 for the TZ170 and wasted almost 30 hours of time on hold waiting for an indian tech with an accent as thick as molasses to jerk me around for a full year. And they intend to do nothing about it, even though the purchase was based on their recommendation -- and with them having all the accurate facts about my network and speeds.

Sonicwall has less than 2 stars on most of their products sold on amazon, and i can certainly understand why. It's obvious i'm not the first person they've jerked around like this. I told them that their tech support and sales department must have a collective iq of 70, or they're just cruel liars who get their rocks off by wasting people's time and money.

I promised Mr. Bowyer that i would make him famous if he did nothing about this, and that's just what i'm doing.

Beware of Sonicwall's sales advice, and if you need tech support you'd better speak Hindi.

Sonicwall ripoff
Scarsdale, New York
U.S.A.