I got wireless broadband from the local electric company (Mt. Wheeler electric) because of how bad Wildblue was. For the most part it works fine. However, there are times that the advertised speeds are not even a 5th of what they should be. We are supposed to have 768k down and 256k up, which, when it is working, it is 2x and sometimes 3X faster than this. The only problem is about 1-week out of the month it is less than 100k down; and sometimes slower than dial-up! The other problem is the latency has increased from an average of 70ms to as much as 1000ms.
I went to talk to customer service about it today: they told me that they are working on it. Great... However, I wanted to know why it has been so unreliable! The women that took my complaint said that it has not be that unreliable. To top it off, she was very rude and dismissive about it. Well, they would not know if they did not get any complaints, and, then a person that doesn't download large files would not even notice it, anyway. When it slows down to 200k you barely notice it when you are only web-surfing. I have tested every part of my internet connection and it is definitely their equipment going into their network, as everything has tested fine at my location!
When I am paying $55 a month for a service, then I want it to work right. I can see an occasional problem; however, it (the internet service) goes screwy at least a couple times a week. Right now, it has been very slow (almost to the point of unusable) for a week straight. I can understand that being rural that it is hard to get to some of the wireless links, but they should be able to make it more reliable than this! I am a HAM radio operator, which I have worked with microwave point-to-point links — way before WIFI was ever implemented — and never had any issues like this.
They are always working on this system, which means that maybe they need to buy new equipment! Granted, we have very bad snow storms here, but, again, they should engineer it to work under these conditions.
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