NO Customer service! I emailed and called everyday for weeks and could get no manager on the phone. I was promised 5 times that a manager would call but they never did.
My internet went down before Thanksgiving and was down for a month. It was "repaired" finally on 12/15. It turns out that the problem occured because of a faulty satellite install.
Internet down over a month. Tech never shows up. Now internet is up as of 12/15 but it is so slow that pages timeout & do not come up 1/2 the time. Better Business Bureau Complaint ID: 75011201
Tech had me go to speed test pages. As I was a former network engineer, I noticed that these pages tested with VERY small amounts of data. This is how Wildblue says that get "high speed" internet. The techs told me they could not test on any sites but toast.com & testmy.com. Both use small "packets" to test. If you go to a different test site, "that they are not allowed to use" where packets are larger, the speeds slow down well beyone normal range.
What does this mean? Well, true highspeed internet has what is called a high bandwidth or "pipe" that allows large amounts of data to flow through at a fast paste. Large amounts of data are "large packets". They should be very fast. Unfortunately, they are not.
What Wildblue is trying to do is tell customers to test at these test engines to demonstrate they really are fast, but they want you to avoid "REAL" test engines or even basic network tools like sending a normal ping test to a huge, well known site like cisco with one mg packets in order to test true round trip times. They will not allow you to use large packets of data to test with. The tech took me to an alternate mirror "site 2" on testmy and said this had "large packets". Well, they were 64K packets... That's about the size of a thumbnail or very small usually "fuzzy" picture. Even at this, the speed was 1/2-3/4 as fast as they claim was possible.
Here's the kicker!!! By sending a large test packet, the network was brought down to dialup speeds and even slower.
Here's a basic explanation: If you send a hummingbirg down a 56 inch diameter PVC pipe, it would fly through at /-50 MPH. It works ok for a hummingbird and even a person under 5' tall. That's moving on!
If you send an elephant down the same pipe, it will have to be cut into pieces and then taped back together on the other side. This takes a long time & sometimes will still never reach the destination! So... You buy high-speed internet in order to get a 512 inch pipe. This should handle the problem completely. With Wildblue, you pay for a 512 inch diameter pipe, but get a much smaller version. Then, when they supposedly prove you get a good speed, they use the "hummingbird trick" that I mentioned above to fool people.
This is wrong, unethical and more than likely illegal!
0 comments