MichaelRS
join:2006-06-10
Half Moon Bay, CA
|  Update to WildBlue vs. DirecWay/HughesNet
I now booted WB and am dealing with the credit card company to get my money back as it is documented here and through endless measurements that WB did simply not deliver the service they were contracted for. Specifically they were a whopping 7% of the cases within their OWN technical specs, and a whopping 0% (that is zero-nill-zip-zilch) anywhere close to what sales continues to claim, ie any number above 200kbps for uploads in the Pro-Pak. Unscrewed the units, packed it up and send it back using their kindly provided RMA. I would recommend to use single-use credit-card numbers if you want to stop paying to them as they are as bad as AOL (remember "retention department").
A couple of fundamental issues:
The spots, their claim to fame, are equally distrubuted over North-America. Surprisingly though, the population does not follow that concept. Yes, Anik-F2 is a TV satellite and not optimised or designed for upload, thus highly populated areas such as NorCal where Internet thirsty forgotten customers sit (no DSL/Cable) fill up the few spots targetting those areas. This is systematically flawed.
Further, I learned WB is charging installers back for cancelled subs. That is bad business practice if they (WB!) are responsible for the customer unhappiness.
Be warned!
Current situation. We ordered and got the Plus Plan on a .98, 2W dish from HughesNet with a HN7000S. Set on Satmex6, 1210. The internet is their and stable. Speeds are 800-1100 down and 50-210 up vs 1500/200 advertised. 76 signal at 62-63 crosspol. I do like the ability to look inside the modem and see what is going on. I am not happy that I have a huge dish and transmitter and continue to get mediocre service. The dish was commisioned in rain (very proficient otherwise though), which apparently does not provide for accurate pointing and crosspol so I am concerned about that and hope once the rain is gone that a new fine-tune would fix things. |
