I just have to post this so anyone entertaining the idea of using them can look elsewhere.
Over a year ago I moved into a somewhat rural area in Snohomish, WA. Coming from 50mb Comcast I was a bit worried about the available services, but my sister lived not 2 miles down the road and had them, and Comcast said it was in my area.
After moving in I found out that Comcast, was actually not in my area, and pretty much stopped at my sister's development. The only other provider was Frontier, but their ADSL lines were maxed out. After entertaining 3g/4g/microwave/etc. I found that my home and the area we live in, is basically in a black hole of sorts where we get nothing but 3meg DSL or satellite. I ultimately bit the bullet and signed up with WildBlue, knowing that I needed the speed, but perhaps could live with the latency issues and bandwidth cap!?!?
After a week, the installer was on site and got everything hooked up and running after a couple hours, 12mb down and 3 up just as advertised. I was relatively happy with the speed, but the 1000+ms times were laughable, and you might as well forget about playing any sort of online game, or enjoy the small things in life like autofill when typing into google's search bar - lol - it's just too slow. I swear after the tech left, I never 12meg again either, but it didn't matter, as I would constantly get 6, and if it did get 12 all that meant is I would reach my cap that much faster.
Fast forward two weeks, and with the most basic of internet usage(wife's facebook/pinterest/music dl's/ebay/etc.), we were banging on the door of our 15gb cap. Granted we were accustomed to 50mb Comcast, so I figured we just needed to learn/adjust our usage habits. Over the next couple months we learned to throttle our usage and I would stay up late into the night if I had any downloads that needed to be started/done. Good god was that annoying.
You cannot understand how frustrating the bandwidth cap is until you hit it, and we would typically do that 2.5 to 3 weeks into the billing cycle, even with moderated usage. Once you are capped, you might as well forget about using the internet anymore because it is so slow - so slow that it won't even load the most basic of pages correctly, as many just time out. Want to try using eBay while capped? Forget it, it won't work...Gmail took over a minute to load, and you better hope no one sent you a picture of any kind, cause you won't be able to see it. They say it's just throttled, but it might as well be cut off altogether, because it sure acts like it is.
Soon thereafter came the snow storms, and that's where it got really fun *sarcasm* - you see when you are stuck having satellite for TV and satellite for internet, if the weather turns bad, you are ultimately screwed. You will get no internet or tv, so you can't check the school reports, road reports, etc., you are cut off from society...From the first snow storm, we knew this wasn't going to work for us.
Quit complaining you say, it's not that bad?!?! Well, what you have to keep in mind is that we are paying over $90/mo. with the leased equipment and 15gb/mo. package - $90 a friggin month?!?!?! - this is a truly ridiculous amount of money in any part of the world for the service offered. I feel sorry for the super rural farmer who has zero options, but this.
It's at this point when I began petitioning Frontier to upgrade their DSL/Fiber lines so that they get more of the customers in our area, including me. I ultimately ended up discussing my needs with the V.P. of Operations at Frontier, and what a stellar man he was. I don't know if they already had the upgrade planned, or they had others complaining as well, but they began the upgrade not long after my first discussion with him. Over the next 6 months, he kept me updated on their upgrade schedule and as of December this year I have finally "downgraded" to 3meg ADSL and cancelled my WildBlue account. Oh boy, what a nice downgrade it is!!
Our last Wildblue bill was $200+ dollars, which I knew was coming, since I was under contract and had a year to go on it, but I didn't realize that an installer would not be removing anything. You see they just send you a UPS box and say "get on your roof, take everything down yourself, unbolt the Tria, and send it and the modem back in the boxes we provide." Thankfully, I am a fit 38 year old man with plenty of ladders, tools, and ropes, because I feel sorry for anyone that has to do this themselves and is not setup for it. What about the 60 year old man who wants to cancel? - how much does that poor sucker have to pay to get someone to come out and remove the equipment?! BAD COMPANY PRACTICES!!!
As I climbed my ladder, secured myself to my rooftop, hugged my chimney and unbolted the Tria. While holding the Tria tightly I chucked the satellite dish two stories down to the gravel below and roared from my rooftop "Free at last!!!", as I felt truly unchained...
We now have Frontier 3meg ADSL and it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, after a year of living with Wildblue. We now have a $20 bill, no contract, sub 50ms ping times which let me game again, autofill on webpages works again, I can download anytime I want, and whatever amount I want - no more bandwidth caps, hallelujah!!! Streaming media requires some buffering but I could never do that before with Wildblue because of the bandwidth cap fear that constantly looms over your shoulder as you surf - it's like a little red devil sitting there rubbing it's hands waiting for you to hit it.
For anyone looking into Exede/Wildblue just ask yourself - For +/- $90/mo would you want to have horrible ping times and be limited to 15gb/mo in throughput? Hell no...but thanks for the stopgap Wildblue.
I won't go into the phone wait times for customer service, the horrible customer service, or the rude employees working in your customer service, as that's all a given at this point from so many other posts. I can also fix the massive bolt holes left in my chimney from your installer, because he was at least nice.!
I will always remember the massive monthly bills, the constant email reminders that we were nearing our bandwidth caps, and I will forever tell anyone I meet to not even entertain your services as an option. GOOD RIDDANCE!!!
↧