[moved here by forum admin - contributed by Member mrwilhite 2 Jan 2006 01:57]
Allow me to share our Wild Blue nightmare with with you fine folks. We started with them through a local reseller rep with Plumas-Sierra Electric Coop in 10/2005. We signed up as a commercial account with the Pro Pack(highest level available). We had charges placed against our account for the the equipment 4X's in excess of $ $1300.00. When the installation was completed we had a 1.5mbps down and around 200kbps up (256 represented) This even though low was tolerable. We continued to have problems with the upstream, never consistent and as low as 40kbps. The connectivity continued to get worse and the modem was resetting on some days as much as 12 times. 12/18/2005 a trouble ticket was finally issued. A tech finally showed up on 12/28 to say they saw nothing wromg with the readings, dish orientation etc. Meanwhile on 12/27/2005 we were FAPed. FAP (or fair access policy) for those of you who do not know, is your allowed bandwidth usage up and down. The up never came into play. However the download limits which were 22,000MB on a rolling 30 day period did. Lets use for an example a 100MB download. If you are in the middle of a 100MB download and your connection is lost, modem reboots etc at say 90% complete, you must restart your download and the 90MB of the download which failed is still charged against your bandwidth limits. This is what caused us to go over the FAP limits. They will NOT adjust this figure nor remove the FAP (even temporarily) on your account. Even though our account shows that the FAP limits have reset due to the 1st of the month we are still limited to 120 down and 21 up! Try to run a business off of that! We have spent over 16 hours in the past 3-4 days trying to get this resolved to no avail. We did receive the run around from them placing the blame on first one dept or member group and then another. We have spoken with represenatives of Plumas-Sierra in customer service, billing, tech support. The NRTC tech support, WildBlue customer service, tech support, customer support and attempted contact with the corporate office which was refused. We have even taken this issue to the NOC as we kept hearing that is was an abuse issue. On top of all this, this morning we received an e-mail billing statement for over 650.00 stating that 334.00 had already been paid (one of the original equipment charges) leaving us a balance of over 315.00. No we are not kidding and have all the documentaion to back it up. If you are considering the Wild Blue, don't walkaway RUN! For more information or if you desire any contact information for this group please write us at thinkcomputers@gmail.com.
Also does anyone know of a GOOD Satellite service provider which has birds at a high elevation? We are on the north slope of a mountain meaning we have a very limited southern exposure. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!