Peter’s Soapbox

So Long, Wild Blue

Several months ago, Wild Blue, my satellite Internet provider, stopped working at my house. After repeated, 1 hour or longer phone calls to technical support and customer service, it was revealed that they had the wrong credit card information on file. However, despite repeated 1 hour or longer calls to resolve this, they didn’t re-enable our account. The effect was, we were without service for approximately a month from March to April.

A couple of weeks ago, we observed that the service was slow so as to be unusable. I called tech support and they said:

1. I had gone over my “fair access” limit
2. They could not tell when the service would work again, but it needed to drop below 80% of the threshold.

Here’s what happened. I had installed JungleDisk and was doing a backup - a big backup - of my notebook at the office. It didn’t finish. When I went home, it resumed. After doing this for a couple of days, I had attempted to upload approximately 3GB of data (so says Wild Blue - I still find that number a bit hard to digest, but there you go).

They offered no fix, other than for me to pay more, which might re-enable the service, but if I had gone far enough over my upload limit, I’d still be offline, and paying them even more money to stay that way.

I decided that

1. WildBlue’s policy of letting you go over your limit, and not telling you then and there, was ludicrous and
2. I was not going to put up with their idiocy any more.

So I canceled the service. It’s back to strictly 26.4kbps dialup until Fairpoint comes along with DSL in the neighborhood. Good riddence, Wild Blue. You won’t be missed.