We use Wild Blue Satellite Internet at the homestead. It has worked fine since December and made our lives a lot better. It has worked much better than the old solution I used which was an AT&T wireless card.
However for some reason our service went down Monday and hasn’t come back up. I called tech support and was walked though power cycling the modem and router as though I was some retard even though I told them I had done it already three times. I complied and did it again and was told that it didn’t work and we needed to have a tech come out to work on it, well duh!
Issue, they “can’t get anyone to our location until April 10th”, really? No what they actually mean is they don’t have any techs in the area for new install until then and don’t want to eat the trip charge to send one! So I am 13 days with out service, they promise to rebate that AFTER they fix the issue.
The upshot is Wild Blue doesn’t seem to give a crap about customer care. They may be your only option but if you have anything else you can use, my advice is don’t use them. By the way if you get HughesNet they are a private label Wild Blue and you can expect the same crappy service. Consider that my PSA of the day. I don’t run TSP on Wild Blue as it isn’t for business operations but I consider answering email to be something it is designed for.
The big issue here is that I generally leave my office by about 2PM central and while I can use my iPhone for short email responses anything requiring a detailed response is likely to have to wait until the next day until we get our connection back. I should also note I pay for the absolute highest level of service you can possibly purchase from Wild Blue, so my experience is clearly the best you can expect.
I asked a supervisor if she would be okay if her phone, TV, electricity or any other service was going to be down for 13 days with out any attempt by the provider to fix it, she responded with no. When I asked her why I should be okay with the same treatment from them, she said, “I understand how you feel”, well perhaps enough TSP members will choose someone else to make them know how I feel.
I don’t call for boycotts mind you and again I am keeping them because in some instances for now they are the only option. I am just saying based on my experience make damn sure they are the only option before you do business with them. Clearly they are a company that values your business so little as to allow more than two business weeks to pass before they even attempt to fix your problem.
PS – If anyone from Wild Blue happens to be reading this it may interest you to know that the audience of TSP is currently in excess of 35,000 people. Many live in or are moving to rural areas, in other words your prime customer base. Perhaps a few hundred in trip and over time charges to one of your techs would have been a less expensive choice?