WildBlue Class Action Suit
Okay,
I put up this site about two weeks ago to rant about the horrible service and misrepresentation of services of WildBlue Satellite Internet. In the original post I made reference to gauging the possibility of a class-action suit against WildBlue.
I have had several people that have sent me emails from either this site or another that I posted about it on and it seems that there is definately an interest so I am pushing forward. In order to really get an idea of how many people are out there that would be interested in joining the suit, please either join this site by clicking the register link at the bottom right of the page or send me an email to damion [at] mscoast.net.
I do not think there is much we can do about their service, but maybe if enough of us bond together, companies like DirecTV will stop recommending them to unsuspecting victims and hopefully we can get them to stop misrepresenting their speeds and services.
Please register, leave a comment, or shoot me an email.
Thank you 
I was in formed after installation there was a limit of uploads and downloads i was allowed. I called to cancel the service and wildblue said they couldnt until they recieved the paperwork from the installer or recieved a copy of a contract i had signed….I never signed a contract…So it took me by suprise when they sent me a copy of a contract with my signature…but it seems it wasnt my signature…dated and signed at a day and time i wasnt even home..they charged my account without any authorized permission… I have made a report to the illinois state police for forgery the attorney general and the consumer fraud agency i am out around 400 dollars currently… I am going to see an attorney for this matter… i would be be more then happy to be part of a class action suit against a company that uses fraud forgery and deceptive practices to steal money from hard working people.
please let me know if this is something more victims of fraud would be interested in doing?
That sounds more like an issue with the installer or company installing the service than with WildBlue itself.
My biggest question since I got involved with this company is why should users have to sign a contract if you are buying the equipment and paying for installation up front?
Answer:
Because that is the only way they would maintain customers past the first week of service!
You can report them to the National Consumer League and if they get enough complaints they investigate and then move forward with a class action suit. http://www.nclnet.org/
i tryed to call wild blue i was on hold from 3pm to 9 pm after finally reaching a real person i was told i would need to talk to another department i was put on hold again for another 2 hours i was again told i had the wrong department i needed the dpeartment i had before
Screwed by Wildblue, I am interested in the class action lawsuit also. Upon installation, which took more than four hours of the installer on the phone with Wildblue as they kept trying to access the wrong satellite, I began to have this gripping fear and angst about what I had done. Finally, it worked, kinda sorta after a fashion, and I could access the internet. Don’t even ask if it was slow, my only response to the question is ‘Are flies attracted to xxxx?’
While the insaller did NOT do what I was forced to sign off for them having done was to set up my WB email account. Other than that, I have no problem with the installer, they since then have gone out of their way to do what they could to ensure my satisfaction, numerous times, without WB consent or knowledge, and at their own expense. WB is a learning experience, they didn’t dump on me all at once, I was to get the slow, tortuous benefit of their deceptive business practices and lousy, incompetent, ignorant, moronic, unhelpful, frustrating, and pitful ‘customer service’ over (so far) the next six months.
Setting up email required contacting customer service at least once, verifying password, username, motherinlaw’s maiden name, secret code password, and umpteen other questions to insure them that I was not a burglar who had broken into my home and was trying to use WB without their authorization. Every other portal at WB which I subsequently tried to access required me to call CS to get the function to work properly, without fail. Four months down the road of slow connections, and continually slower connection speed, numerous calls to CS to resolve the issue, and it was determined that a bad modem was intially installed and would need to be replaced. A cloud would appear in the sky about 50 miles away from me and I would have no service. The leaves of a tree near my house might have been interfering with the connection, so I hired someone to climb the 70 foot cottonwood tree and butcher it, it is now the biggest and ugliest cottonwood tree on the planet. It looks just like the one in the yard of the Addams family ‘mansion’. Four months of this nonsense before it was determined that the modem was bad.
The installer felt so bad that they came out to install a new modem, at their own expense, which required them to contact WB to set it up. WB refused to set it up because they had not been contacted first and there was no RS number. More days of waiting for resolution resulted. Please hang in there, because the worst is yet to come, and I took all this in stride, and really, really wanted high speed internet since I spend a lot of time online.
I cannot say I ever waited more than 15 minutes to get CS on the phone to ‘help’ me. It is possible that I called so many times that I may have been plced on some sort of priority list, but I just don’t know. Once the modem was replaced, I no longer needed to bother the installer or WB CS, I figured it was going to be clear sailing, fast connections, and freedom to fly everywhere online at blazing speeds without interruptions of any sort, short of fairly heavy rain, which meant I would have no connection. This I did get, accepted and understood that it was just the way it was going to be.
Alas, it was not to be as imagined. While we did get a lot of rain, with the subsequent downtime, WB was not going to be happy until they got their fees every month while providing absolutely nothing in return for it. My usual internet routine is blogging, historic research, and a fair bit of it. My only other option for net access had been dialup, and at 21.6k, it could tale 30 to 60 minutes for a Youtube clip to load. No fun at all.
I had also been introduced to Skype, and invested in the hardware necessary to have VOIP throught them. Besides being able to call anyone else in the world with Skype for free, for $30 per year, I could call any phone number in the US and Canada. That is $3.00 per month for unlimited calls. After weeks of trying to get the telephony hardware to work, numerous calls from folks overseas to assist me in that, I decided to email WB CS to see if they had any suggestions. Their reply was that they don’t support VOIP, so no Skype. All it takes is for them to download a small bit of software (I’m told) in order for them to do so. There are WB customers who claim they have Skype working over WB, but none of their suggestions has been helpful in my case. Thanks WB, for providing the absolute minimum service (and less when you feel you can get away with it) and refusing to add a tiny bit of good to your ‘service’. But even Skype is not the worst thing that frost me to no end.
I started with the top package, the most expensive if I were to keep it for the 12 month contract. I did so at the suggestion of the installer, since their promotion was the first month free, and $100 off the installation. What wasn’t made clear in the advertising and promotions is that the different packages refer to the amount of data transfer allowed? With my current package, I can download and view maybe 10 video clips, Youtube or others per month. Apparently, I downloaded and viewed a few too many, about 3 times more than the choking restrictions allowed by the silly policy and package I ended up with, and so I am on some sort of restriction where my access speed is choked off down to dial up speed. I apparently used some ether space that might have been used by someone else (but never is), and they have a million customers whom they wish to make this ether space available to whether they ever need, use, or want it. HUH???? The PC gobbledegook replies to emails I sent WB CS were hopelessly unintelligible, and repeated requests for plain English explanations of PC legalese were utterly useless and frustating. The replies were just more verbal PC dancing and a link to some gas gauge ostensibly showing that I used X amount of empty unused ether space that was in reserve for some other WB contract fool. HUH???
Apparently I am supposed to go to some portal at WB to check this gas gauge and monitor my usage after any internet time used. HUH??? I have to use more unused ether space every time I use ether space to be sure I don’t use too much unused ether space? HUH??? Where is the explanation about these limitations posted where they can be seen and perused before one signs the contract? Every time I have I tried to access this portal to monitor my usage, the damn thing DOES NOT WORK. I have seen it twice, from a link in an email sent to me by WB. I got fed up with calling WB CS every time I wanted to access some portal on WB, I shouldn’t have to do that. Certainly there must be some sort of gauge or warning WB can provide in advance of nearing your limit, but no, WB won’t provide anything that may assist you or make your WB ‘experience’ anything that approaches pleasant. They would rather choke the crap out of you when you inadvertently cross some silly, arbitrary, restrictive line. As far as I am concerned, these gauges can be set to say anything they want, before or after the fact, there is no way to monitor their software or verify what they claim.
And since they have my credit card number in orderto deuct the monthly fees, they have the upper hand. But there is a way around that, which I am not going to reveal here publicly. The last complaint I have with WB comes from this vey same issue, the credit card. As usual, the damn portal that shows what they took from me last month DOES NOT WORK. The fees vary each month, and are trending upward each month. What the hell is that??? I understood that the fee was going to be a set 49.99 per month, they are taking closer to 60.
I am going to contact the state attorney generals consumer protection office to see whether this is legal in my state ot not. I have kept putting it off, but no more, I am totaly fed up with WB and would not recommend them to anyone. WB is the reason for such blogs as this, and they will continue to create bad PR unless they change their behavior and policies. Customers shouldn’t have to call CS everty time they are required to access the portals neccessary at WB. Customers shouldn’t have to go out of their way to monitor usage or end up on ‘restriction’, and there ought not be such a restriction. If they can’t get their own site to work properly, they obviously don’t give a hoot about anything but the money, get the money and to hell with whether the damn thing works, to hell with customer satisfaction, and to hell with any improvements. My contracts ends in about five months, and DSL has become available over my phone line a few weeks ago, so it is so long WB, maybe even sooner than later.
I did see a few complaints on the net before I signed up with WB, but they really didn’t understand what they were talking about, so I considered them foolish rants. This site seems to be a vast improvement over those seen in the past, and will hopefully be a warning to many who are considering WB. We need more WB customers to post their stories here, as I am sure there are many more bad WB experiences out there.
I just tried to find out why my speed has been “slowed” for the last eight days. I get the usage part, but they cannot tell me how much I use per day. They keep referring me to “the meter” which shows nothing other than their arbitrary percentage used. I kept asking rep “how much have I used” and she could not tell me.
I AM going to state AG
And I thought I was long-winded when it came to my rants
The important thing in getting the word out is to find as many people as possible to find this site and post their experiences.
If we can all band together in this, maybe we can make a difference. The more people that have been taken by Wildblue band together – the better chances we have of putting together a successful lawsuit against them.
As for the monetary issues – I talked to my credit card company today. They cancelled my old account and are issuing me new cards.
Well i am very disapointed in wildblues service and will post all of my service rants once i have time, you can count me in on the lawsuit
[EDIT]::Removed Email Address from Public View
Richard ramsey
I’VE HAD WILD BLUE FOR 3 DAYS AND I am VERY DISAPPOINTED.
This internet is weak & wack, I called Wild blue service and they started with the weather check first. Since im from phoenix, arizona the whether is clear 90% of the time. So that wasn’t it. Service had me check whether the optimizer was installed or not. It was so that wasn’t it. They had me unplug the WB Modem Restart my computer & that wasnt it.
So they finally said that is is probably slow because of so many people on the internet. In my head i was thinking that more people use the internet on weekdays because of so many people working on computers these days . . .
This is a stressful situation. I use dsl at work that goes up to 1.5. that works great. Ive used verizons internet card on my laptop and that is way more reliable than wild blue . . .
I have my little brother, my mother & my father thinking we were getting high speed internet. They did say on the phone that I could connect up to 10 computers. That all I would need is to get a router.
Then when I call customer support they start with do you have a router connected if so this will slow you down . .
They send me to that toast site to fool me into thinking that the speed is okay when i check the speed through
toast is reads 1533kb & when i use cnet internet speed tester it reads 930 or 900…
When i change from one site to another is takes about one minute to two minutes to load . .
If i try to login to my bank account that takes even longer.
You tube videos stop half way or even on forth of the way . . .Maybe ill get lucky and see a whole video yippy!!!
But seriously something has to be done with this Wild Baloney Company.. Since I’m still in the 30 day money back
Im going to try to get ride of this prehistoric system . . .
Ive learned from reading on the internet that wrong cable have been installed in some cases
when i get home I am going to check what kind of cables where used Since the installer mentioned that he also installs Direct tv . . .
Tomorrow i will post my findings . .
THanks to you all I Feel that we are all on the same boat . .
Cesar
cesargraphics@mac.com
If our situation with Wildblue, which mirrors those of all other comments, were not so sickening and depressing, we would actually be laughing right now. Just last night my wife and I talked about starting a new blog at Blogspot.com. Guess what out topic would have been…Class Action against Wildblue. Guess what name we thought of…Yep…You got it!! Wildblue sucks. We were going to use “Wildblue SUCKS” as the main title and “Let Us Tell You How” as the sub title. Anyway, Thanks for getting the ball rolling. Yes, we believe there is a sound actionable basis for filing an initial individual claim against Wildblue. We believe, given the information we have collected, that there are certainly hundreds, if not thousands of potential plaintiffs across the nation that have had and/or continue to have issues, if not identical, at least substantially similar to our issues. It certainly appears that getting a court, either State or Federal, to certify our filings into a valid Class Action is extremely probable.
It’s Midnight here in Southern Illinois and I need to get some sleep. Tomorrow I’ll post several more blocks of information for all to peruse, ponder and use in your individual battles. Until tomorrow then…Goodnight all and THANKS to ADMIN for creating this blog. Let’s put it to good use!
Regards,
Jake
No problem on creating the blog
The funny thing is – if WildBlue had let me out of the contract I would have eaten the cost of the dish and installation and chalked it up as a lesson learned.
They gave me crap about it and even worse yet, I contacted the BBB in Colorado about them and they defend their company by telling you to contact their technical support. As pissed off as I am with them and they want to try to resolve my issue with tech support? This does not even take into consideration how much more aggravated I would be after sitting on hold WAITING for their support to answer the phone!
Oi Vai…
I feel your pain brother. We are in the same situation. If they would release us, we’d be both gone and silent. But no longer. The link below will lead you to 17 pages and over 350 complaints about this very issue, disconnects due either to bad TRIA’s or shoddy installs. These complaints date back to early 2006 and give a clearer picture of the true scope of Wildblue’s service failures and customer abuse. These complaints make for disturbing but nonetheless interesting reading.
http://www.epinions.com/msg/show_~threads/cat_id_~9/id_~4917/forum_id_~172/pp_~17
I’ll post more stuff later today.
Regards,
Jake
A couple of questions and then a brief comment.
First, has anyone on this Blog ever spoken with anyone at the Wildblue “Retention Department? I seen several references to such a Department on the epinions complaint link I posted earlier. Just curious.
Second, I also saw a couple of epinions complaints reference a Wildblue Email link that the poster said could be used for elevating subscriber complaints up a couple of levels. The Email address was listed as “executiveescalations@wildbluecorp.com” I have not tried to Email the link, but did try clicking into “wildbluecorp.com” and got a “server down or unavailable” error message. That means ther IS a web page with that URL, but it is offline or access blocked. Just curious if any of you have heard of this Wildblue web space before.
Comment. I couldn’t shut my brain off last night and get to sleep. As I lay in bed, I decided to try and think like Wildblue. How would I handle equipment and performance failures and lots of angry subscribers across the nation. I quickly realized that I would have Wildblue management, particularly Wildblue legal, regularly surf the net looking for Blogs and web pages like this one. That’s the one problem with the public internet cloud…it IS public and accessable by victims and criminals alike. Just something to be aware of as we vent, share stories and discuss options. It is also possible, if not likely, that Wildblue itself might set up a false complaint web space in an effort to collect names and track the activities and plans of subscribers who are getting screwed with an eye toward proactively thwarting their efforts. I don’t know if Wildblue is actually that smart, but I think we should at least consider the possibility. Given Wildblue’s other activities, I wouldn’t put it past them.
I can’t think of any way to protect or prevent this kind of activity, but I thought I should share it anyway.
Suggestions? Comments? Am I being paranoid? Alternatively, Am I being paranoid enough?
To: ADMIN
My comment above was NOT aimed at you. Please don’t think that I’m attacking your credibility. I’m not!!! I just wanted to alert you and the other members and surfers of this blog to the possibility.
I moved your comment to its own post – I think it deserved its own attention:
WildBlue Complaints Conspiracy
In your opening post for this category you mentioned that you hoped enough Wildblue subscribers would band together and that companies like DirecTV would stop recommending Wildblue.
Here’s why DirecTV is recommending and co-marketing Wildblue.
DirecTV is owned by News Corporation.
32% of the shares of Wildblue are owned by Liberty Media Holdings.
Liberty Media Holdings also owns a block of News Corporation shares.
Liberty Media Holdings is leveraging its ownership positions in News Corp and Wildblue by co-marketing both services, and by doing so, hoping to increase the share value of both companies.
Pretty neat trick, isn’t it.
…and the band played on.
While I did not research the stock holdings of DirecTV, i figured it was something like this or some sort of joint partnership between the companies..
I would love to join in a class action suit against Wildblue. My nightmare started July 2007. I was given the chance to telecommute for work and jumped at it. All I needed was something better than dial up to connect to our server. I’m considered self employed and connect to a network server.
I called WB since DSL wasn’t available in our area. Customer Service answered all my very specific questions on what I was going to use the system for and the fact that I have my home set up wireless between the kids computers and my business computers. They assured me that the package I purchased was to set up five computers and was compatible with the programs I was using.
Day one started the nightmare. The installers were here literally 12 1/2 hours setting up the system. They were on the phone with WB tech support because the system wasn’t working properly and couldn’t get the email working. At 10:30pm, they thought it was done and told me to sign the contract showing they installed the dish (glanced over it, but after 12 hrs and no dinner, I was tired and didn’t read the fine print).
Started having problems from the start. It took 2 weeks to be able to use their site since the installers were suppose to have it set up. The speed was actually slower than the dial up I had. After many, many hours on the phone in the first month, I was advised that the contract just says that a signal is reaching the dish and the speed is a “could get up to”.
Their customer service tries to help and then they transfer me to tech support that is a joke. The reasons given for their crappy service have been:
- although we say you can use up to 5 computers on the plan I have, you can’t use a router
- if AOL was EVER on the computers, it will cause a problem
- wind, snow, rain, clouds or leaves are blowing somewhere in the USA (doesn’t have to be in FL)
- you can’t have or ever had Norton antivirus on the computer
- their system isn’t suppose to be used for work, virtual school or anything where you need a reliable serve (came from tech support mgr)
- get a cingular internet card to use when the system is down (from the service company who came out and couldn’t fix the system)
- tech support mgr stated to read their updated contract stating they are not responsible for speed, connection or down times. As long as the dish is getting a signal, the integrity of the system is not their problem.
- last call I made two days ago, was that their system is not to be used to connect to a network or other service and now having Windows on the computer is the problem. They’ve gotten to just grasping at reasons to blow me off. I signed onto a site that checks my speed hourly and keeps a record. I even presented it to the tech and it didn’t mean anything. It showed I was anywhere from signing on at 8 kb to 500 kb. I pay for 1.5 mg. Tech told me they according to contract, it COULD reach those speeds. It never says you will.
I work for a mortgage company and sell insurance and can’t even access our service to take the applications. Two days ago I left the system on to print a very time sensitive doc and after 6 hrs it printed. Didn’t make compliance in getting the docs out. Missed the deadline in taking my state exam due to the system not being able to hold the signal and kept timing me out (I had 30 days to work on it).
I did speak with customer retention. They don’t care if you cancel the next day. According to THEIR CONTRACT, you are still responsible for the full year. I think they cringe when they hear my name. I would call over and over everyday and then get tired of it and give up for a couple of weeks.
Sorry this is so long. I’m so frustrated about being ripped off by their scam. If at the time I called I was told that it MIGHT stay connected and COULD reach those speeds, and that it couldn’t be used with AOL, Norton, Windows, networks, virtual school, connecting to servers, working from home, or that they don’t stand behind their product and don’t care it your satisfied, WHY WOULD I HAVE BOUGHT THIS CRAP! That’s why I feel they use fraudulent sales practices. I even called back to 4 different sales rep and asked very specific questions to verify what they are telling would be customers. I have a very detailed notebook of all the calls, dates, times and badge numbers of everyone I spoken with.
I could go on and on with my ranting. After seeing many boards like this I think a class action suit is needed. Maybe we should set up a board to see if anyboard is actually getting what they paid for from Wildblue. I think their wouldn’t be anybody joining that board.
Tina
This sounds so much like all the emails I get from others telling me about their service.
Many people do not feel comfortable posting their experiences on a blog like this but I still get many in my email and this is much like theirs.
Keep getting your story out. If you see other people with similar experiences, tell them about this site so we can get more people together for a suit against them.
I do not believe ((you cannot sue me policy)) applies in a situation.
What I received was totally misrepresented , technical support is inadequate.
They had to come out three times to work on my system before they could get it working properly
and when I complained that the service was not much better than dial-up they blamed my computer.
After reformatting putting in a new LAN card and having 2 service technicians check out my system
they found nothing wrong with my system that they told me that the service I was receiving wasn’t much that are then a dial-up connection which I was paying $9.00 a month for .now I’m paying six times as much for the same crappy service
of dialup if that’s not misrepresentation and in deserving of a class action I don’t know what is.
Please let people know that we are tired of taking this kind of abuse from our politically protected
corporations…. it is our right to sue anyone that trespasses upon our trust. Please let me know when legal action is pending
I definitely want to be a part of it.
# 1 find a lawyer # 2 get a list of people that’s been screwed over by w/b
and let the lawyer take over from there.
Please add a place on your web site for a confidential list for those of us
who wished to pursue this action. I’ll be happy to be the first to sign up
I’ve had a stroke several years ago and I am disabled I use a dictation program
I spent a lot of time on the Internet because there’s not much else for me to do
when I signed up for W/B Internet service I thought it would be a blessing instead it’s turned out to be a very big joke on me at my expense. I spend a lot of my time falling asleep at my computer waiting for it to load and that’s not a joke.
The only lucky thing for me is that I ordered WildBlue through Dish Network, so the install/equipment was only $199, but the customer service rep. neglected to mention the legalese. From what I found out later, they are supposed to direct every potential customer to their website where you can read about the non-guaranteed speed and their Fair Access Policy. I had the service for about a month, wondering why it was so frustratingly slow when it seemed so fast to start with. Well, at this point I’d purchased not only the satellite equipment but a router and wireless network cards for several computers. I had three desktops, 1 laptop, an xbox, a PlayStation 3, and a Wii all connected. So it didn’t take long before my speed was restricted. When I complained to tech support I was told I was in violation of their FAP and was directed to their webpage where I read all about it. I proceeded to check my usage and instead of the alloted 7500 MB, I was at 13000+ MB. I was very angry, especially since I’d spent all this money (after being on MSN dial-up for years.) My kids were complaining – when one connected, the other one got kicked off. Everything was moving slower than dial-up and I was paying $50/month for this crap? So I told them I didn’t want it anymore. The reply was there was no grace period – if you want to cancel, then it’s $25/month X 18 months remaining on your contract. Then I was given the name of someone to complain to:
Brian Dansby
Executive Communications
EchoStar Satellite LLC
dba DISH Network
Phone: 720-514-8629
Fax: 303-723-2063
E-mail:brian.dansby@echostar.com
I immediately sent an email to Mr. Dansby, threatening to cancel my entire account and find another provider (DirecTV) and he assured me I would not be charged an early termination fee. Well, I thought everything was great, until I received my credit card bill (the one I paid for the install with.) Dish Network had charged me $425 ($25 X 17 months remaining.) I’m still trying to get that situated (I have protested the charge with the credit card company.)
Anyway, I am back to MSN dial-up (never cancelled it which turned out to be a good thing.) Sorry this post is so long, but I am definitely on-board for a Class Action lawsuit. If nothing else, I’d love to get my $200 back. And I also have an extra dish sitting in my yard.
My first impression of the whole FAP was that it is just a way to get you to upgrade your package to a higher one. Bait and switch all the way…
I’ve finally gotten around to posting on the web, my W/B complaint.
It seems obvious that the CS job, for those who are hired for the position, probably begins with an intense training seminar , and consists of learning all the customary lies and excuses for dealing with irate customers.
Their whole business is founded on theft and lies. I don’t believe they ever intended to provide a service. I believe they went into business knowing full well that they would falsely advertise and proceed to steal from their victims, whom they would trap with contracts, (long evil laugh echoing from WildBlue).
Okay, enough of that…
Dial-Up. Yes, it sucks. But the price is decent. That is, unless your paying $50 a month for high-speed, but getting dial-up speed instead.
I was in heaven…
High speed internet was on it’s way!
Little did I know the nightmare that awaited me.
I ordered WildBlue on April 22, 2006. I’ll leave out the bit about trying to get Vonage to work, and then giving it up.
The installer was to show on May 5, but, of course did not. They rescheduled me for May 13, but again, a no show.
They rescheduled again for the 17TH, this time they got someone from Tacoma, WA (I live in central WA). He showed. But this wasn’t good either… He didn’t do the install correctly; He didn’t ground the dish with a copper rod, rather a steel rod, the pole was wobbly, and he didn’t ground the tria. So, of course that got ruined quickly enough.
They wanted to charge me for the replacement (don’t remember the price, over $100 I think. Correct me if I’m wrong), and the service call, $90. I about came undone so they gave it all to me for free. Okay, I was happy with that.
Then there were the usual nightmares; constant FAP “violations” so I was always at dial-up speed, I had no service at night, or when it rained, or…you know the usual stuff…
Then to top it all off, the tria died AGAIN, 5 months after the last one had been replaced. I had been without service for two or so weeks. They wanted to charge me for the replacement and service call. I complained that they were using faulty/poor quality tria’s.
You know what this girl says to me? She says; the equipment is OUTSIDE, it’s going to incur some wear and tear! Pa-lease! I told her I’ve had DISH TV for five years! Their dish is right next to the W/B dish, and it has NEVER had a problem! I said, I’m not paying for another tria or service call 5 months after the last was replaced! I told her to cancel me, and that I wanted the monthly payment that had just gone out a few days earlier credited back… Well! That’s just not going to happen! They’ve got the money, why would they give that BACK?
I’m on SSI, regardless, no one wants to pay for services NOT received!
I know that CS is just that, CS they aren’t the people in charge, and therefore I have always been civil with the CS of other companies…
But this girl was unbelievable. I lost it. She just didn’t care that W/B was stealing $50 from me for services I had not received! I have never, no exaggeration, been so angry with a CS rep. before! I just couldn’t believe that a company would do business like this. I was seriously shocked.
I told her I would let the world know the kind of business they were doing…to my surprise, the world already knew. There were a lot of sites complaining about the EXACT same things that I had experienced!
I started looking for new providers (some wireless providers had shown up in my area).
I found one who offered way faster speed than W/B’s top package for $13 less per month than their bottom package (the $49.95 package).
And other than a nightmare, the loss of time and a lot of money, internet is good again!
No one else should have to go through this.
So, Yes, I’m in!
What about this crazy google conversion? I still can’t get email to work via Apple’s “mail” software. I now have to receive my email via the web at wildblue.net. When I’ve searched their tech help section of their web site, the instructions they provide just don’t work. I’ve attempted to talk to someone live on the phone to no avail. Over the last week, I must have spent > 5 hours holding. Some nights the recording said there was “an increase in call activity, so please call back later” and then the connection just went dead! Even try finding a phone number on their web site is next to impossible. There must not be anybody working in customer service.
This company should be out of business given the absolutely terrible, actually “no” service to customers. How can we spread the message?
The absolute best way to spread the message is to tell people about this site. The more people we have telling their stories here, the better we rank in Google and ultimately, the more people will see what a horrible company WildBlue is.
Hey ya everyone. WildScrew is bumming me out too.
If there is definitely a go for a class action suit, count me in.
It is getting VERY close!
Hello, people! I just want to add my voice to the chorus of complaints about Wild Blue Internet. The service has been on for maybe a month now, and the quality has gone from disappointing to unacceptable. Finally, today, the speeds sank so low that I realized dial up would be better! I just spent over an hour of my life trying to figure out how to contact them. They sure don’t make it easy. Their support site is useless & leads you in circles. Their service is simply not as advertised. I sure wish I had found this site before signing up for 2 years of this abuse. I wish I knew how to warn people to stay away from Wild Blue. I will definitely support the class action lawsuit, so count me in.
One more thing: Wild Blue is blocking registration emails from WordPress at this blog! My first attempt to register, I used my wild blue email address, and the confirmation never came back. The second attempt, I used another email, and it came within seconds. That kind of says it all, doesn’t it!
Hey, what about nominating this site on Digg? Are there enough pissed off Wild Blue users to get this information to the top of Digg? We could keep on trying until it catches on…
OK, here’s my first attempt:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Class_Action_forming_against_Wild_Blue_Satellite_Internet
Please Digg & expose this scam in front of the world. Join Digg is you haven’t already, so you can support this effort to get national attention on the subject.
How’s the class action suit going?
I’m in the middle of trialing DSL from a local company that couldn’t reach us a couple of years ago, but now are just barely in range. We’re getting 1.8 mb/s – and it’s MUCH faster than the mid-range Wildblue package.
Going to give it another week or two, and then get rid of Wildblue. Please count me in the class action. WildBlue’s customer service – especially with Google – is ATROCIOUS! Can’t get anywhere online with them, and they still have the recording on phone support that asks to call back in a couple hours, and then hangs up on you.
We are definitely getting closer to being able to proceed.
Glad to hear you have DSL on your doorstep now
Add me to the list of those wanting to sue. I bought the top tier plan for a whopping $80 a month through ATT. For several months all was good. But I’ve been getting hit with FAP violations which they use to crank back my speed to less than dial up. Keep in mind that for $80 I am supposed to get 17 GB of down load and I am not a bandwidth hog. I do Yahoo and Drudge and Youtube and a little Itunes. I dont need so much bandwith, I just want speed. I have been waiting for 3 weeks to get back up to speed. I cant access my FAP monitor page to see my usage because none of my 3 separate computers and 3 browsers on each can load the page. I have called tech support on this at least 4 times and I get tossed back and forth between the wildblue techs and the “special Wildblue team” at ATT. As it stands No one wants to take responsibility for my problems. When was the last time a multimillion dollar computer related company had a tech support line that said “Please leave your name and number and we’ll call you back within 24 hrs”. It’s been 3 weeks and 5 calls and never a callback. The way I have gotten through is calling sales and explaining my dilemma. Sales is always available. Tech support is never available. Sales pushed me through to a friendly yet useless tech support lady who knew nothing. She gave me a number to call that would be sure to solve my problem. Guess which one? “Please leave your name and number and we’ll call you back within 24 hrs” Oh and by the way they provided no reference number for my case. They must enjoy having me repeat the story every time I call. I am very close to halting all further charges on my card. Then when billing calls me maybe I’ll get someone who really wants to help me out.
After much of the same, initial service good in 2006, then slow, then rain/snow outs, then “sunny day” outages, to $175 in technical support charges to have a WB techy assure us it was on our dime; and now 8-10 blink outs each evening to “cannot view webpage” and many interrupted downloads. Our home business depends on the Internet and we pay for the $80 for their “zenith” service. We live in rural Vt and DSL/other is not available until early 2009. Today I was searching for a “class action lawsuit” against Wildblue to sign up, and found a post on Digg referring me to here. We are not getting the service we are paying for, in fact each evening I must reset over and over in order to view mail and internet.
Thank you and sign me up.
Add me to the sue list as well. I have not had service in over 4 month’s, wildblue gives me runaround. they will not send a tech out to look at it. I believe i need a new Triac i had it professionally installed and read some forums and realized my triac was supposed to be grounded it is not. My modem will not synch up. I cannot get anyone from or for wildblue to send a tech out, not even if i try to pay. They refuse to give me a refund. They refuse to give me service. Please Help
Aaron
EDIT: Removed email address to protect from spambots
would love to join in on law suit.they cut my speed to almost nothing.. when i called i was informed that it was a penealty for using to much bandwidth. they said it was there was a 30 day penalty.. 30 days are gone and still my service is almost nill. LETS GET THE WORD OUT………..what is going on they have oversold and want to keep on overselling in order to do this they cut us to almost no service.. new customers will get decent service for probably a couple of months..apalal@yahoo.com
We are very interested in the class action suit. My daughter is an attorney in Florida and would be interested in looking into this. She would not charge us anything up front. Let me know if you are interested.
Thanks,
We have the same service nightmares that others have listed. Additionally, we had two 65 foot trees removed because our installer said it would improve our service. It didn’t.
I for one am totally for the lawsuit, I am retired and run a small home based business, my experience with wild blue was just as bad as every other person i have read about.i have been dealing with computers since 1976 and really should have known better but…. I was sucked in by their false advertising also.
I do have a problem with the bbb of Colorado, i filed a complaint and they sent me a response and a link to click if i wanted the dispute to escalate, well the link is dead and I called and so far have gotten no response. I have till Friday the 13 to respond or the dispute will be closed. and since i only used wildblue for 21 days and it cost me 700.00 i really don’t want to close this dispute. any help with this out there ??
thanks and wildblue really does suck
royal kershner
royalkershner@iwon.com
I will join the lawsuit. I have had dial-up, DSL and cable and I’m sure two soup cans and a string would be better than WB
Please include me in your class action suit.
I live north of Houston in an area where we don’t have access to high speed internet just dial-up. AT&T told me to call Wildblue. That’s when the problems began.
I had problems with Wildblue immediately after I called them to connect their service. They came 3 wks later to install their equipment. The installation guy charged me an additional $150 for a needed pole that they went to buy at Lowes. I had access to the internet for 5-6 days then had trouble connecting after that. (got FAP or something like that) I had to disconnect after 3 wks because I didn’t want to spend hours on hold for them to help me. Now they have sent my name to a collection agency for collection because I disputed the charges with my credit card company and they didn’t pay, so Wildblue has not been paid. I am not paying for something I didn’t have. I am considering contacting an attorney to fight this. Please email me so we can talk about this via email. I have excellent credit, and I don’t want them messing it up.
As I stated above, I figured I would likely need to cancel my credit card in order to get the Wildblue monkey off my back and out of my wallet. After my 1 year contract was up, i did just that about 2 1/2 months ago. Sure enough, they keep sending me an email every month stating they tried to bill the monthly fee to my card. No amount of calling or emailing gets a logical response from these people. Despite the promises to have a supervisor call back (it never happens), talking to the billing dept. (they can’t stop the emails – corporate is in charge of that), or close the acct because it is in dispute.
Apparently it was corporate’s decision to continue billing customers despite the fact that the customers contract has ended, or that they have called and told WB that they want to end the service. Apparently corporate instructs CS and Billing to string the callers along so the card can be billed as long as possible after the contract is over and the customer calls to cancel service.
Communication with these people is a one-way street, their way or no way. Everyone should know that the only way to end WB is to cancel the credit card and have a new one issued because that is the only way to get their hand out of your wallet. You must cancel the card before you contact WB, or they will snag the entire years fees from your acct if you tell them to end service.
Understand that WB will probably never cease to remind you every month via email that they will never get out of your life. Maybe that is a good thing, because it reminds me to come here and check on the progress of the suit (in the works).
Bart
I’ve had WildBlue for about a month now, and its been more of the same. I work from home, and in order to do my job effectively, I have to pull a substantial amount of data down each day. Its not a ton, most of it is compressed, but I’m sure it adds up. Combine that with regular surfing with my entire family of three, and we passed the “Fair Use” limit in the first week.
When I called tech support, they explained to me the fair use policy and the terms of service, and were surprisingly polite about it. I must have been lucky, this tech went straight to the point. So I explained to him (this was within the first week, mind) that the service was not going to work for me, and that I needed to return the equipment and terminate the contract. At that point the termination fee (for 23 months) was explained to me. I don’t know about you, but I can’t easily fork over more than a thousand dollars.
It wouldn’t even really bother me if it was slow, since dial-up is the only other real alternative out here, and this lets me not tie up a landline. No, what bothers me is the reliability, which is about 0. (It was decent at best before Fair Use came into play, although the high ping made my necessary FTP transactions a PAIN.) I mean, an internet service that consistantly fails to load the google homepage fails at being an internet service.
Their tech support, although polite, weren’t helpful at all. The guy I spoke with had the NERVE to suggest that I try to log on from 10:00 PM to 4:00 AM, when traffic was down and I MIGHT be able to “do some surfing”. (This was before Fair Use ever came into play.) Thats not internet service. Thats not worth a penny, and if I had known that, I never would have signed up in the first place.
At this point, because I am relatively trapped by their legal shizam, I’m going to end up paying for two internet providers at once, as i’ve found a much better service provider to switch to. If there is any way that I can break out of this contract legally, I’m all for it. WildBlue sucks. Long live this blog, spread the word. No one should EVER have to deal with this.
Gamefreak 00134 what service provider have you found? I am looking to ditch Wild blue. I supposedly busted the upload limit in first month, no verification, no email, and after almost 3 weeks in the penalty box, still not down to 70%. From what i can tell it is a scam to get folks to upgrade,but i am already maxed out. I am going to DC my CC payment due to not fulfilling contract. Fair usage penalty should decrease payment as I am paying for a certain speed, not getting the speed, payment should decrease also.
Check out the sign up agreement, that WildBlue uses. It is nasty and patently illegal in most states (including this state). It is a very predatory, one sided, and just plain not at all acceptable. It completely violates my rights as a consumer. I actually thought I was signing a work release, when presented with it.
I got no actual help from wildblue support…ever…supposedly their job. One guy said he could see that I was online, when the entire system was disconnected from power at the source. I tried talking on the phone numerous times. I was a pest, and it was always all my fault. They treated me like a total moron, but never actually dealt at all with anything I complained about. In fact, they stopped responding at all. I stopped calling, and began emailing. This also got me absolutely nowhere. I finally pushed buttons by repeatedly contacting middle level management, so they disconnected me…the weekend before my last month with wildblue was even up (January 25th). I was seen as a total pest, completely ignored, then was arbitrarily disconnected from the service.
I am no amateur, and kept close track of my FAP usage. It was not even close to the usage they showed for me. I then used their own information, to check it out, and guess what…the usage they reported, still was wrong. According to them…I was always wrong. I supposedly used up my total FAP one time in one week, using WiFi 802.11g, when the service was down for five days of that seven days. Wildblue is seriously over subscribed, and they use the FAP as a scam to cover it. New Year’s weekend, they were down the whole time. Does that tell you anything? They simply had way too many users, to accommodate me.
I had my system completely disconnected for 20 days of a 30 day period(from 11/26/2006 to 12/17/2006 actually) and was using a Belkin WiFi router. When I shut it off, the power is turned off completely, for both the Wildblue satellite system and the Belkin router. I absolutely cannot be using bandwidth, at that time. That would be entirely physically impossible. You cannot tell me, that would have exceeded the “FAP” threshold, in that much time…using a single WiFi 802.11G connection. I have screen shots of my supposed FAP usage, supposedly updated hourly, it did not change for five days straight, even though the entire system was disconnected. That is absolutely ludicrous.
They unilaterally cancelled me, not me them, and it was on the 25th of january…not the 1st of february. They broke the contract…not me! They disconnected me, because I tried too hard to get a response from them. Wildblue is still trying to bill me…and so is the installer…about $830.00 worth between them. Their contract says they do not have to ever provide any service, but I still have to pay.
I am not an idiot, and do not appreciate being treated as such. There was only one tech, who did not approach this as though everything wrong, was all on my end, as a starting point. Every other tech I dealt with, was entirely useless, and well below my level of competence. All they were doing was a game of CYA (Cover Your Ass).
After months of searching for remedies, I sent tech support an email, and this was the response;
“I think our pathological spammer is back.”
They dropped me because I complained too loudly about the complete lack of tech support. I am paid one month ahead…but I owe them $830.00. I never remotely received anything close to what they advertised. They do not provide the advertised service, then unilaterally disconnect me from that service, yet I am supposed to pay for that service…that I never got! Wildblue uses a very aggressive collection agency, one that likes to threaten me. They are based in colorado, as is Wildblue:
WildBlue Communications, Inc P.O. Box 4427 Englewood, CO 80155 (888) 278-6858
My WildBlue account was – WBRES089048
I got this via email from WildBlue legal on the 25th of january, 2007. They never addressed any of my issues with them, and ignored my emails, completely. They would drop contact with me instantly, if I contacted them via their supposed direct website feature. No one chose to ever deal with the problems I was having. Everything was always, all my fault…and I was always wrong! “Ozz has spoken!”
January 25,2007
Via Email to dand3@,athenet.net
Certified Mail Return Receipt Requested
Re: WildBlue Account No. WBRES089048
Dear Ms. Larson:
WildBlue is in receipt of hundreds of emails you have sent since December 1,2006,
about your account. In addition, you have obtained the internal email address of several
WildBlue departments and now have directly emailed these departments several hundred
times. For example, on December 15,2006 alone, WildBlue’s Abuse department received
45 emails from you (3 separate emails sent 15 times each). On January 23, the Legal
Department received 23 emails from you from multiple email accounts all containing the
same message. Many of the emails you have sent contain harassing and abusive language.
WildBlue’s Abuse Department has spent numerous hours troubleshooting your complaints alleging that WildBlue is miscalculating your internet usage. After spending a
significant amount of time investigating your claims, we have determined that they are
baseless. In contrast to your claims that your modem has been unplugged for various periods of time, our systems show that the modem is unplugged, then plugged back in for a short period of time with significant data download and then unplugged again. WildBlue has
repeatedly verified through its systems records that your usage totals are correct and that information you have provided cannot be accurate. This information and the results of our investigation has been provided to you numerous times, As a result of your harassment and your fourth violation of WildBlue’s Fair Access Policy, your WildBlue service and customer agreement will be terminated effective immediately. Due to the harassing nature and frequency of your contact with various WildBlue Departments, we further direct that you contact WildBlue only via written correspondence mailed (not emailed) to the Legal Department at the address below. WildBlue will not respond to any other form of contact from you, and reserves it right to take any and all legal action to protect itself from further harassment.
Sincerely,
WildBlue Legal Department
They abrogated the contract…before my month was even up…with me paid one extra month ahead. They also left me with $316.50 worth of equipment, that is now entirely useless. I also never got anything close to the service they advertised. It is all a scam…an expensive and aggressive charade. I was the only one noticing the problems,(as they repeatedly told me). Actually, I am definitely in the majority. If you check out the web postings, everyone seems to have the same problems, and the same complaints.
They owe me for one month of paid ahead service, and they owe me for $316.50 in now useless equipment. I also believe that they should not be allowed to continue, as a business.
Have had to suffer with wildblue for some years now and am still pissed about them cutting my bandwidth cap from the original 26gb to 17gb. Also am fed up with their ever worsening customer service. To top it all off the average speeds keep getting worse and the latency worse. Very interested in joining a class action against them. Have filed BBB complaint and found that the BBB is pretty much nuttless when it comes to resolving an issue. COUNT ME IN, SUE THE #@$&@*%$’S
I had WildBlue service for almost 3 years. During that time I never had the speeds that they claimed. The best performance I had was recorded through an online speed checking service as 364kbs. Far below the 1.5mb+ I was promised and was paying for.
However that is only a small part of my issue with WildBlue.
During the month of May of this year my service got sporadic. It would be on for an hour then would go off for anywhere from several hours to the entire day. This would repeat for the next couple days before I contacted WildBlue technical support.
Technical support took me through the basic reboot of the system and stated that they were unsure what the problem was and to call back. Upon calling back with my ticket number I was redirected to another support individual that stated, “We’re unable to identify what the problem is. You need to schedule an onsite service call.”
When I asked how much the onsite service call was I was told that since my initial 2 year service contract was up it would be, “$120.00 for the service call and $199.00 for parts.., or I could sign another service agreement and the service call would only be $120.00 with no charge for parts.”
Frustrated I grudgingly agreed to the later of the two fees and scheduled the service call.
The service call date came and went with no contact from WildBlue or the service technician.
A week after the intended service call date I received a call from a technician that claimed to work for WildBlue and wanted to reschedule the service call stating that I wouldn’t have to wait the two weeks I had waited before for the service call date. I rescheduled the service call for the following week.
Three days after the second service call date when no one showed up or called I called WildBlue customer support and requested to talk with a manager. I was told that there weren’t any managers at the call center location. When I asked how I could get in touch with a manager that I wanted to complain about the service and treatment I had received I was told that I could write to a PO Box address and that they didn’t give out the phone number to the corporate headquarters.
I was also told by an operator who identified herself as Maria, “If you submit a complaint in writing I can’t guarantee that your account won’t be canceled.”
During this time my credit card had been billed two months for service that I wasn’t receiving.
I immediately asked for my account to be canceled. At this point I was transferred to a supervisor who confirmed the cancellation of my account.
Several days later I received a call from a WildBlue technician requesting to set up a service call date. I called customer support again and found out they had not submitted the service cancellation that I had requested days before and I restated that I wanted my service canceled.
This was in August.
This month, October, I received an email from WildBlue containing an invoice for last month’s, September and this month’s service charges in the amount of $166.76 which is consistent with two months billing of $83.38 which was my previous monthly amount. They state that unless I pay this amount in a timely fashion I will be reported to the credit bureaus.
They are effectively trying to charge me for the months of September and October after I canceled my service in early August.
The billing I got today is for $105.00 against my cc.
I will whole heartedly support a class action suit against WildBlue.
Since they are affiliated with AT&T I think they should get involved.
WildBlue is a company that needs to be out of business.
I hate to admit this, but I am what I would consider a victim. I was having some troubles with my Verizon EVDO card and was desperate for something better. WildBlue states on their home page “Lightning Fast”. Needless to say my EVDO card is much, much faster that WildBlue. I just cancelled and I’m out nearly $700. But it’s cheaper than spending $69 a month for the next 2 years. Hats off to Verizon! I’ll stick with it. WildBlue is only for those of you who are in truely remote locations and have NO OTHER OPTIONS.
I am sitting here writing this on FREE dial-up, which I may add is much faster than wildblue, in as much as the pages actually LOAD in about 3 seconds, unlike Wildblue’s promise of that happening all over THEIR website. I am currently in Wildblue hell as I didn’t know we were hardly able to download anything at all to continue to use, what they call wonderful speeds. (With THEIR defective testing.) LOL
I have NEVER been able to get a page to load in less that 25-30 seconds, can’t play a simple game of Pinochle on Pogo, and was recently told by one of the higher ups named Allen Atkinson that Wildblue is NOT compatible with Pogo, when he promised earlier today to release me from this Wildblue hell, because this was my 1st offense. I can NOT currently get on the internet and have no idea how long before I am able to use Wildblue, but they certainly have access to my account, to drain it and make money, while they use my bandwidth for other unsuspecting people. I have a deep feeling they are NOT able to accommodate all the people currently signed up with Wildblue and that is why they have this usuage policy which was NOT clearly disclosed BEFORE we sign a 2 yr. contract, or any contract with them!
My hubby is fit to be tired because he thinks the 70.00 a month we pay is a sad ripoff for the service supplied. I agree.
Wildblue’s service tec was here shortly after I got this service and used Speakeasy.com to test the speed’s and was quite annoyed about the slowwwwwwwwww page loads. It has NEVER changed and that was in October 2008.
Funny that they cut your speeds when in Wildblue hell to 130Kbps download and 25 Kbps upload and the one time I actually got on the internet & checked speed, guess what?? Speakeasy was right on the nose with their documentation of the crappy speed. (I took a screenshot) That was 2 days ago folks.. today I cannot even get on….probably because they do not want me to see if I am close to the 70%.
SOMETHING needs to be done against these kind of practices, and I will NEVER again trust a company who HAS to have a contract to supply crappy service!!!!!!! (Seems a contract usually means bad service and it is the ONLY way for these shottish company’s to be in the money.
I am so upset right now that i did not research Wild Blue before getting the service. My husband and I have had the service since March 13,09 and have been able to use it for 4 days only. Our computer got a virus and ran for 3 days straight uploading files(file sharing) any hoo, it used up our bandwith for the entire month and suppossedly slowed down our service, when actually we can’t even get connected now!!!! I have contacted Wild Blue CS two x’s a week since the first week we got it installed and I get told the same thing everytime I call “they are sorry for the inconvience but, unfortunately there’s nothing they can do on their end”. I had one CS rep turn my complaint into the Wild Blue “abuse dept”. WTF is that. I’m a brand new customer and have used the service less the a week how the hell am I abusing it? After reading all of these blogs I can see that my issue will not get any better. I would love be apart of this class action law suit. WB must think that their customers and f—idiots and will stand by a do nothing…
I purchased wildblue in 12-2006. I have not had a problem until recently. I had a service tech come out and was advised that my satelite was installed incorrectly, and had to be moved and it cost me $100 for additional equipement. Last week I tried to copy my computer as a backup to Carbonite, and exceeded the download limit. I have talked to Wildblue until I am blue. Presently I am at 172% of limit, and they have decreased my speed to like dial up. Until I get below 70%, I can not have my usual speed. I asked about closing account and setting up another account, and they said the fees would be approximately $100 set up fee, plus shipping of $25 for new equipment, and that I could NOT keep my old e-mail address. They stated I would also have to lease the equipment, since they no longer sell the equipment. I told them I already have the equipment, however they said I could not use that equipment, and would have to lease new equipment and pay a monthly fee for lease. This is ridiculous. They said some installers might buy back my equipment. I am self employed, and need the internet for by business. Presently I am having to copy files to a jump drive and take them to a friends house to sent out my work. I would very much be interested in adding my name to the LawSuit.
I got wild blue a month ago, and has had problems from the start, signed no paper work for wild blue only directv,add my name to the lawsuit, lets put a stop to this scam!
I just got off the phone with directv and can not go to directv.com and get any info on my account, becuse the email address is a wild blue that I never heard of, we got to put a stop to this…………….
I have had Wild Blue for almost three years. Had to purchace all my equip, husband had to furnish the tools for the installers, who by the way didnot even know how to turn on a computer. It was OK for the first year then it started to slow down. We hav a new roof put on the house and had to pay the roofers to re-install the sat. as WB doesn’t do this sort of thing, but they did come to re-set it and said they would come back to secure the dish and cable. this was in April of ’09. They never returned. I now have 56k at the fastest and my computer often “times out” downloads because it takes so long. I no longer am able to buy or sell on auction sites because of the lack of speed. I am paying $49.95 a month and if a dark cloud comes over I lose service. I have bought a special router, a gaming computer and the other two computers are state of the art and less than 2 years old. I have been told that they have over sold their satellite. I subscribed through our Rural Elecrtic Co-op but now they cannot do the tech support and I cannot afford to be “on-hold” for a long period of time. I just want service comparable to what I have been charged and am paying!!
Sign me up for the suit.
I joined Wild Blue in 2005 when I discovered my dialup in my new, quite rural home was getting 9600 baud (sic) connect speeds. Obviously, what wasn’t going to do in this day and internet age, but cable and DSL were still (and still are) about a mile away from me. When our Rural Electric Coop advertised the coming of a satellite internet service, I jumped on it. I found I was the second call they got about it (I’d called on the weekend and left a message, after reading the insert in a bill we’d received on a Saturday. Our mail comes in the afternoon – I guess the first caller must have gotten their mail in the morning! :-} ).
Since all of my work is reported online, I chose the highest available bandwidth package for $80 per month, was to give me speeds of up to 1.5 megabytes. Had a little burp during installation, since nobody informed us of the $300 installation fee…but the installer knocked it down to $100 and off we went.
Everything was great until this spring. Suddenly, I was timing out. My Facebook pages would go back to login. Internet pages would either take ten or fifteen minutes (yes, minutes) to load, up to half an hour or even longer, or I’d get errors and they’d not load at all. When I called Support, they would troubleshoot, and sometimes things would improve, but only temporarily (for an hour or two).
Other times, the service would simply go down. Even for days. I’d call and get a recording saying that they were aware that there was a problem in our area and that they were working on it. It would be up again, for an hour, or a day, and then it would be down again. When it was back up, it would be excruciatingly slow.
Once in April of this year, I was told that I had exceeded the Fair Access Policy standard for bandwidth usage. I was unfamiliar with it since I hadn’t come up against it before; it had been lightly touched on – no, breezed over in the beginning, since I wasn’t an online gamer. Support explained it and told me how to check my usage. Fine, except the function to check it with was virtually always (no kidding) down until mid-August, which somehow doesn’t ring fair. How are we to manage our use if we can’t check it? THAT made me pretty angry! Nonetheless, on those occasions when it was working, I was able to see that I’d made the right changes and I was staying well within limits. In fact, I had actually gone over on only a couple of days in March, so I should never have been FAP’d!
What that means is, I had never did have a rolling 30-day average that exceeded the Fair Access Policy, once their own system worked well enough for me to see the averages. I should not have been restricted, if in fact I ever was. Support was admittedly only guessing to explain why my service was so slow. And it has never improved since then.
On one call, the techie took me to TOAST to check my “ping” speed, which seemed to test fine. Well, I can still tell you that it’s slow. TOAST is toasted. I read earlier about some other site I will certainly be trying. Whatever the ping speed is, Wild Blue is slow. When pages take over a half hour to load, that’s slow. When I pay $80 per month for that, it’s slow and it’s expensive. And it’s not “blazing fast,” either.
On another call, the tech told me he couldn’t advise me unless I disconnected my router. Another tech told me she could give me some advice about my router after we tried some other things (we’d done some stuff with the modem first). No wonder customers are so unhappy, with so many people on different “sheets of music.” It seems that Wild Blue is extraordinarily poorly run. It’s too bad that there are so few competitors in this business and they can rake us rural folks over the coals.
Most of your problems that I see here and everywhere are poorly installed systems, installed by hack installers. That’s not wildblue’s fault, that’s why they employee Field Service Managers to and technicians to go around fixing these poorly installed systems, and decertify those technicians, so that wildblue doesn’t keep having all these complaints and cancellations. I have a large retention rate on my customers because they were installed the right way, I have been certified for over 3.5 years. My customers LOVE Wildblue. Below is part of your contract not sure if you guys can really do anything. But hey I’m not a lawyer just thought I would pass it along before you guys start wasting money on lawyer fee’s.
8.3 Dispute Resolution. To expedite resolution of problems and control the cost of disputes, you and WildBlue agree that any legal or equitable claim relating to this Agreement, any addendum, or your Service (referred to as a “Claim”) will be resolved as follows: We will first try to resolve any Claim informally. Accordingly, neither of us may start a formal proceeding (except for Claims described in this section) for at least 60 days after one of us notifies the other of a Claim in writing. You will send your notice to the address on the first page of this Agreement to the attention of the Consumer Affairs Manager, and we will send our notice to your billing address. Notwithstanding the foregoing: (i) any Claim based on Section 1(i) above, and (ii) any dispute involving a violation of the Communications Act of 1934, 47 U.S.C. §§ 605, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 1201, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2510-2521, or any other statement or law governing theft of service, may be decided only by a court of competent jurisdiction. Any action to enforce or construe the provisions of this Agreement shall be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts in Denver or Arapahoe County, Colorado, and the Parties hereby consent to the jurisdiction of these courts and agree that venue is proper in such courts. There shall be no class action lawsuit pursuant to this Agreement. Any cause of action brought by you, or by users of your account, with respect to the Service or this Agreement must be instituted within one year after the claim or cause of action has arisen or be barred. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply to this Agreement and it is acknowledged that this is a services contract and not a contract for the sale of goods.
You folks have some good stories about WB, but I think I have you all beat. Oh, and installer, some of us know a pile of stinky green stuff when we read it. The company (WB) is ultimately responsible for its representatives as the installers surely are, so drop that cop-out right now. Poor installer practices in no way lessens the other WB CS Issues, faulty FAP, bait n switch practices and billing snafu’s.
I signed up for this USELESS crap back in May 07, and it never worked right. Still doesn’t. I spent over $200 in cell phone overages, as we have no land line, to CS. Hours on end of holding eats up minutes fast! I’d kill for plain old telephone dial up net access, like I had back in the 90′s! That smokes WB. I was told this and I was told that, but NEVER once did any of those CS idiots ever ever ever concede that the WB system might be at fault. Since I started a trouble ticket within the first week I wasn’t too concerned. I was promised a service tech would arrive on June 10, and there was a no show. Now this wasn’t the same outfit that installed my system, but somebody else, and I never did find out what was wrong with the company that did the install making the service call. Then I was promised a service call on June 22. You guessed it, a no show. No phone call nothing. More calls to CS and another date was set for July 15th! No show. This went on and on until LABOR DAY weekend when, on the holiday Monday a kid of about 20 showed up with a beat up pickup and a ladder strapped to the bed. This, of course, was after we were told the tech would be there Saturday, and again on Sunday. They forced us to stay home and wait on them over a holiday weekend 3 months after the trouble ticket was started.
This tech replaced all the connectors on the two cables and ran some tests. Come to find out the grounding block, a $.50 part, was defective and had been from day one. My trouble ticket, which I still have all the numbers thereto, clearly shows the date under which the charges were to be waved. Guess what. They tagged my credit card for a service call. This required more cell minutes wasted on CS and billing. Two months later, only after I sent them an email with scans of about 20 documents, was that service call money credited back to my card. As far as I am concerned they stole that money and used it to earn interest money fraudulently. I was sure charged interest on the money from the CC company!
I am no computer guru, but I have used one flavor of computer or another since the early 80′s. This FAP crap is absolutely a pure case of fraud. I can prove it. I have a Mac and this little utility program that measures the actual data sent and received by the computer, NOT the WB modem! The distinction here is I did a one week test where I had the ethernet cable disconnected, but powered up, from the WB modem after taking a screen shot of the FAP meter. I then checked my FAP meter and it showed an increase in my usage in both directions. Another test I did recorded the ACTUAL data RX and TX through the computer’s ethernet port over a one week period which I compared to what the FAP meter shows. Again the FAP meter was over reporting the actual use by about 15%. It seems that the pings sent and received in the normal operation of the modem via internal hardware, if powered on and not connected to any computer still count against the FAP. This means that if their service is having issues communicating and it sends huge numbers of pings back and forth attempting to establish reliable connection those count as well against the FAP. The only way to stop this inactive/non-user initiated communication is to completely power down the modem.
I have saved dozens files over the course of my association with WB. I really got the chat help folks going nuts when I informed them that I was copying every word they typed. They claimed this was impossible as what was on-screen was generated by some Java script which didn’t allow copying or saving the text. When I told them about “Snapz Pro X”, a little Mac screen capture program that can record ANYTHING on-screen until the HD is filled, my session was terminated and I have never been able to use their chat help since. They flagged my modem, and I know they have this technology. I suppose I should have not told them about the screen capture software so they could be caught up in even more lies and snide attitude.
All I ever see as a result of a class action lawsuit is a group of lawyers on both sides bill a pile of hours, the company being sued settles without blame and the consumers get the shaft. The FCC doesn’t give a rats backside about us rural consumers as they told us a big fat lie about the end of analog TV, which was supposed to free up low cost broadband. That all will be given to the cell folks for a song, and only in large markets. I don’t see a thing changing no matter what we do. Big money runs this country and they can play fast and loose with our rights.
Still, it’s possible that WB might get spanked, and it this is even remotely possible I want in. No company deserves to have their backside warmed more.
Sorry to be so long winded.
RAS
I have not reviewed the contract in some time, but most have a severability clause which will remove portions of the agreement which take away certain rights. This is one of those type arguments. You can write it in a contract all day long but all it takes is one judge to say that it is not enforceable and it will be stricken from the contract. You cannot specifically take someone’s right away from them to pursue legal action in a service agreement.
As for notification – I along with several others I have spoken with have notified WildBlue and nothing ever came from it – reminds me of those little “Complaint Department” items you see in novelty stores which has the trashcan right under the ticket bin.
I want to say that I agree with most of the comments.. I have trouble all the time getting connected to the wild blue page…they say my modem is bad.. my lights are green like they say so I think it is wild blue themselves… i will be most happy to get in the class action lawsuit against them… i am thinking of going to hughes since we dont have DSL ..wish we did, i would go to that..
I have had WildBlue for about a year now. I recently moved from VA to AL, which is when I had the service activated. Since there was a major reduction in speed when going from cable>DSL I got that highest package offered. I am spos to get 16gigs a month but have never come close to that. Mainly I upload about 20-30mbs a week/100 mbs dl tops a week. Since I have had it set up it is with out a doubt the worst choice in ISPs I have ever made. In the afternoon I only get 20kb dl speed. Mind you my bandwidth is not limited when this occurs. It is 9pm right now for that matter and it took me about a hour/hour and 1/2 to register and post this. When my bandwidth is limited because of the FAP, I have no internet for up to 2 months. I was told that my internet would not go out during storms, if the smallest cloud comes over the house my internet is out the entire day or longer. I produce music and host it over the internet. When this occurs my business is shot.
I have called WildBlue many times, and have gotten the run around. Last time I called was over my bandwidth being limited and I waited over a month for this to be resolved. Oct 7th or 8thI was transfered about 13 times and told over and over that their department doesn’t handle the issue I was having. Finally I chewed one of them out, and I was sent to a supervisor. He told me I had over 20gigs dl in one afternoon! With the speed of my internet it would take me over a month to even come close to 10 gigs. I told him that was bs and he needed to fix my internet because I was having that. He said there was nothing he could do, it was the system and they cannot make changes in the system other than account info. He also said that normally they just bump the people up a package then bump em back down and that fixes the issue, but since I had the highest package he couldn’t do that. He said he didn’t know what the large amount of DLs were and asked me if I was hooked up to a wireless router. I responded no, and that my computer is off most of the day and I have the best security (firewall/spyware/etc) you can buy. Then he asked me if I used bit torrents. At that point I went off on him cus he pretty much suggested I was a pirating and a thief. He told me my internet was gonna be back at full speed on the 18th and they couldn’t do anything. Its now the 30th and nothing has changed.
I am still on contract, so I am stuck with them for about 5 more months or more. They are with out a doubt the worst ISP providers I have ever experienced and I have not received the service I was told I would receive since after about a month into the contract. You can and me to the list of that lawsuit and if there is anyway I can help just let me know.
I really hate the service and the “tough luck” customer service attitude. What we have is next to dialup service of which they refer to as high speed.
I emailed today to see if we could put our service on hold as we vacation out of state in the winter months. The answer was not unless we have a second account. Most companies like my dirtv will put our service on hold until we return and just add the additional months onto the contract, but not wildblue. The (free install a year ago) cost almost $300 and if we terminate now with another year to go we will be charged $195, even if we were to move out of state where they don’t service. Now that is a major rip off. Unfortuntely until they have your money and get you set up you don’t know how bad the service is and then they have you in a bind. I wish these contracts could be baned as people have a right to leave a company if they are not pleased with the service and not have to dig further into their pockets. Especially in this ecomomy!!!
Add me to a class action lawsuit. I have had Wild Blue for over a year and have had few days of decent service. The comments and excuses I have received and recorded over that year from tech services and electric company I purchased the service through are ridiculous.
I previously had HughesNet. HughsNet worked, and their tech support worked when there was a problem too. I switched because of Wild Blue’s deceptive outrageous marketing. It led me to believe they were much better than Hughes.
I have pages of documentation of the low speeds I’m experiencing. Also pages of ridiculous statements from techs and service providers. How about this one? We discount any Pulse results from the evening hours because all internet providers experience a slow down in the evening hours. therefore, your system performance is acceptable. (I often experience down speeds of 100-200 after 3 pm).
I am an independent contractor and am unable to work from my home because this slow intermittent speed doesn’t work. I have to go to friends homes to use their better service.
Help. Let’s get started. This is clearly illegal.
My provider has 900 customers – one employee – do the math. They couldn’t get a better deal financially.
My 18 mo. contract will be up the end of March. I work online — speeds are so slow and usually at night no service. Tech support is in some unfriendly nation to the USA–they will say anything to get you off the phone. No help at all. FINALLY, the local phone co has begun our servicing rural area with very positive results. I was dubious but they installed yesterday and we are blazing fast. It was getting to the point with Directv/Wild Blue that I would lose my job because of missing teleconferences in the evening. We were buying the pro package with Directv bundle at almost $200/mo. To compare, the phone co’s basic pkg is $19.99 and is 10X at least faster. Dropping the Wild Blue and keeping the Directv which I have no complaints (customer since 1994) will save 89.00+/month. A class action suit is much needed for all the victims out there.
I have only had Wild Blue for going on five months and it started from the git go. The equipment was bad I had to pay to send it back and had no service but hey they charged me for it the installation even worse it looked like Denny and the dimwits installed it. I have been over charged every month had slow service and charged for equiptment that I a woman of 55yrs had to climb on my roof to get off when I moved and send back!When you call your lied to and they are forbiden to give you Corporatets phone number not one time that I have called them which has been alot was I not given the run around even when you send equipment back they charge you for it $320.00 taking what ever they want from your account with no remorse for there screw up!Then they offer a month free hell I am still waiting for the three months I was over charged and promised no charge for the next month so how is that doing anyone any good they are such liers, scammers, and conartists it isn’t funny yea sign me up for the class action lawsuit I have all my documentation and notes of who I spoke to and what they said!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I HATE Wild Blue. They are expensive, slow, rude–this is a miserable experience. As per the example above my comment, I, too, a middle-aged woman will climb up on my roof and take off my dish. I’m anxious about the possibility of the over-charging.
I tell everyone it’s better not to even have internet than to have Wild Blue.
I hope you get your lawsuit and I hope you win. Hughesnet is getting sued for pretty much the same stuff.
I had WB installed 2 weeks ago… after the first week it stopped working. When I called customer service I was told I was over my 30 day limit (158%), after 1 week? I’m still in the process of trying to get usable service. It was my understanding that The Consumer Protection Agency had a grace period policy for ANY service or product, or I would not have agreed to a contract. I still have to investigate this aspect, but if not resolved I will definitely be on board for a class action suit.
I just got “fapped” yesterday & it sucks. Shows I went over my bandwidth & am at 103% I always have teetered on the edge & got close like 95%. Their policy is a rip off & I told them so on that pathetic forum where a “CS moderator” was just a smart ass & no help at all. I guess I’ll have to wait out the 30 days.Not going to sue just have to vent that when you pay almost 100.00 a month you should have unlimited access. That bandwidth usage crap is propaganda & they are full of it claiming they need enough to go around. If they don’t have enough then maybe turn down new customer. Paying for the best package the “superior” or whatever they call it I shouldn’t be paranoid of losing my connection & having to check that damn WildBlue Monitor thing.
Just an update, I’ve been a cutomer for 4 years. Today I’m reduced to using aol dial-up as a back up on my old computer until I’m unfapped, how ever long that takes.I can’t even get online with wildblue, no connection. Frist time violating the effing policy. As I stated above I was fapped yesterday & I don’t give a crap what excuse they make this isn’t anyway to treat your long time cutomers who pay 100.00 a month.
My back-up aol is 9.99 a month & I have unlimited online dial-up access, slow as shi* but at least I can depend on it. If it wasn’t so slow & I didn’t live in a rural area I’d drop WildBlue like a hot potato. They know they have us who live in the country without dsl & cable over a barel..
Thanks to the creator of “WildBlueSucks.Info”!!!
ADMIN EDIT:
The rest of this post has been moved to its own thread as I found it very interesting about the FAP.
See post here: http://wildbluesucks.info/2010/09/29/wildblue-satelliteviasat-fap-by-todd/
I HATE WILDBLUE!! I live in the boonies where our only option is Wildblue. Hughesnet is not available. So we had no choice. I ordered the highest package from the start as I knew I’d need it. It was going well, I’ve had it for more than a year. But suddenly like 5 months ago I’d get the FAP warning like all the time. Once I had my speed slowed because I went over, and I called CS to see if I could have it restored because I didn’t understand how I’d gone over. They reset it as a one time courtesy, they said they allow you one reset a year as a courtesy. So that was all fine and dandy. However, a month later, my speeds were slowed again. Now this is ridiculous because I had been decreasing my usage and doing everything to make sure I wouldn’t go over again. I’d even disconnect from the internet when not using it, sometimes even unplugging the wild blue router itself, therefore obviously not using ANY internet. I called in to complain and ask for a reset again as it’s impossible that I went over. The customer service was AWFUL. And that’s being nice! They said that they could not reset because I knew of the FAP and violated the usage threshold and it’s policy to reduce the speed. I asked to speak to a supervisor. They had the nerve to make up a ridiculous story that even if they would agree to reset it, that they could not anyways because the button that gives them the option to on my account on their computer systems was not there. Claiming the button is only there that one time a year for the once a year courtesy. PATHETIC! I was so pissed off I said, “So basically I’m paying $90 bucks a month for piece of shit internet”. She said I’m sorry you feel that way but that is their policy. My usage was starting to decrease, and I thought, ok, just be patient. I’ve barely used my laptop, I even went to my sister’s who lives an hour away to use her internet today. I had unplugged the router again. I check the usage this morning… it increased?!! How the hell did it increase if it was unplugged!?! Ugh! Something needs to be done. They’re sucking out your money and giving you crappy internet and customer service.
Thank the Lord, my husband and I just bought a house and will have wonderful dsl. Pretty bad when you’re looking forward to dsl when others have fios or cable internet. But hey, I’ll take anything over Wildblue. If there is any petition or legal thing going to happen against them, let me know, I’ll be the first one there!!!
I’ll join any law suit against these crooks.
My speed is always being slowed due to their ridiculous FAP and they want to increase what I pay which is already too high. Internet access is always slow with them. I hate their company! Wish I had an alternative. Anyone know of any? I’m off grid. I wonder if cellular would work better?
Just signed up 2 months ago and already reached my download threshold. There is no way i’ve downloaded the 7 gigs allowed. Now i’m waiting with limited service to get below the 70% to get full service back. Still at 91%.
We were told it was faster than the service we had, and needless to say, it is alot slower and constantly knocks you off. We called within hour of installation and was told we were stuck with it for two years.
Hello, I see a lot of talk about a law suit, but I checked the U.S. District court of Colorado site and I don’t see any suits filed. I’m ready to file. I realize that a class action suit is a large undertaking, but I happen to be a legal secretary who is very familiar with the process. We need to collect the names and states of the various people who are interested in the suit. Then we file suit in Federal court because they do business across the country. The number of class members we have when we file will determine if we can be considered a complex litigation case. For those who believe a law suit won’t help, consider the fact that it costs tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend a class action suit with hundreds or thousands of members. The fact that so many people can be gathered to file suit against one entity lends some credit to the complaint and makes it that much harder to just have it dismissed. Even if we don’t end up with a large sum of cash out of this, don’t you think it would be nice to screw a company they way they screwed us?
I Live in the state of New York and am very interested in sueing these crooks!I have been using Wildblue since 2006 and have hated it every day since.I have the same complaints as everybody else,… slow connection, download usage not going down, not getting download usage promised ,etc…. They advertise that you get a certain amount of download per mnth in their packages but you do not get even close to that “so” to me that is misrepresentation and should be liable by law.In my eyes they owe me for all the usage I didn’t get but paid for the last 6 years! I definitely want in on any lawsuit against those bastards…..sincerely Bryan
Melissa,
We have been unsuccessful in obtaining legal representation thus far.
Are you with an attorney who has reviewed some of the facts and willing to take on the case? If so, let’s talk.
I will copy you in email.
Damion
Someone has to stop Wildblue. They are completely misrepresenting their service and making millions from consumers who don’t know where to turn for help. Please include me as part of the class-action if we can find a legal representative. I live in SD. Thank you, Damion for organizing this effort!
I too am fighting with Wildblue. I have had the service for the past 6 years. We had a hacker a month or so ago that we caught only because he maxed out our FAP and they had turned our speed down. They talked us into the bait and switch on speeds. We have been testing for the past week and our fasted speed has been 462Kbps. Sign us up for the suit!!
got wild-waste about 5 months ago
one week into it i knew i was the biggest mistake of my life
there is and never was any high speed internet
been off line for the last three days too. total morons, and crooks. Sign me up
WildBLUE has been ripping me off for 2 years and they know I have no choice! I live in a rural area and my local phone company offers Wildblue internet service or dial up. My only choices.
I complain about the incredibly SLOW internet speed constantly, RUDE Tech support from India and No help from the local office either. I started out with the $39.00 package but have upgraded to the “Pro-pack” for $98.00 a month and IS SLOWER NOW! The keep telling me I have “FAPPED OUT” my usage. Whatever the hell that means. So I have been unplugging the entire box including the cable from the dish itself! Still, no good after a full week of the router box being unplugged and being out of town. I checked my usage from a hotel and it indicated that I had a “spike in downloads” during a period when I WAS NOT EVEN HOME and the damn box was not plugged in at all! I thought someone had been in my house! No one had been in my house. The snotty bitch at the phone company defended WildBlue and even called me at my house later to rub it in that I have NO CHOICE! After I explained that I had NEVER received “high speed internet at any point” She stated this, “THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS HIGH SPEED INTERNET”! But that is what Wildblue advertises! Disgusted and broke!
And it’s not just wildblue – the whole satellite industry needs to be brought to book – what follows is a cut and paste of the “chat’ I had with Hughes after wildblue had finally pissed me off again
Incidentally, during one of my long phone calls to wb their rep sympathized with my problem and said I’ll transfer you to someone who may be able to help – He then connected me to Hughes I’m not joking. Anyway back to the subject:
Please wait for a site operator to respond.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
All operators are currently assisting others. Thanks for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
You are now chatting with ‘Stacy’
Stacy: How can I help you today?
you: stacy – your site gives a basic package at #9.95 per month. How long does that price apply?
you: 39.95 – sorry
Stacy: 3 months.
you: and again 39.99
Stacy: lol, yeah it’s $39.99/mo. for 3 months, then 59.99/mo. after that
you: 3 months! $60 for 1 Mbs?
Stacy: yes. Do you have access to cable internet service?
you: No – because the comm cos have the country divided up
Stacy: oh ok. The price is higher because the technology is more advanced. Our speeds are doubling this year when we send up our newest satellite in the 2nd quarter.
Stacy: it sure beats dialup though. Our slowest package is about 35 times faster than dialup
you: I am 25 mins from a state capital, 20 mins from a county seat and 45 mins from the largest city in the state and have no cable, no wireless of any sort.
you: What will the speed be when the new satellite is launched?
Stacy: the speeds will double when the new satellite is up.
you: what to 4 MbS for the top plan?
Stacy: the good news is satellite internet is available anywhere, so you don’t have to rely on whether or not your local cable company wants to spend the money to run lines to your house.
you: 4 Mbs is 1990s speed
Stacy: 4mbps is lightening fast for rural america in 2011. Nothing comes close to our speeds where you live. It’s up to you. It’s more expensive, it’s not as fast, but, it’s 35x faster than what is available. So, it really depends on how much you need internet service.
you: I rely on it to make my living, but I guess I’ll be sticking with what I’ve got because you’re offering more of the same for more money
Stacy: if you think OUR speeds are slow, you should see our competitor. Their plans are half the speeds as ours, literally.
Stacy: Wild Blue’s lowest package, the $49.99 package is 526kbps. Our lowest package is 1000kbps
you: That’s why I want to change, but you’re offering the same for more money and no guarantee of better service.
Stacy: plus, Wild Blue cuts people off for the month if they go over their limits
Stacy: I guarantee our service is better.
Stacy: We’ve been serving the military for over 30 years, and they’ve relied on our technology for decades. Our equipment is superior to Wild Blue. They are basically a start-up
you: You will guarantee that I get what I pay for?
Stacy: absolutely
Stacy: Wild Blue costs $69.99/mo. for 1mbps. I just checked their site.
Stacy: ours is $39.99/mo. for 3 months, then $59.99/mo. for the same speed
you: So if I pay $60 for 1 Mbs I will get 1Mbs all the time?
you: (And I bet the military is getting better than 4 Mbs)
Stacy: unlike with Wild Blue, with us, if somehow you go over your daily threshhold limit, it will reset at 10pm. Wild Blue slows you down the rest of the month.
Stacy: (you’re right, lol.)
you: Will you guarantee your speed?
Stacy: (you’re right, lol.)
you: Will you guarantee your speed?
Stacy: yes, we actually can.
Stacy: half the customers we sign up every day are coming from Wild Blue and love it.
you: So let’s be clear. If I sign up for your $60 month package, I will always get 1Mbs down, 200kbs up, provided I don’t exceed my bandwidth allowance. I won’t get speeds of half that and then have Hughes tell me – well the fine print says…
Stacy: exactly. With us you’ll get what you pay for.
Stacy: what a concept, huh?
you: No, it’s not a concept – all business is supposed to operate like that – goods are exchanged for money
Stacy: I agree. It’s just amazing how many people I chat with that have Wild Blue that have the same issues. It’s not right.
you: Okay – let me think about it. If a rep (or whoever) will guarantee the service speed in writing, I may switch – but I can’t see that service being sustained.
you: The 1Mbs I mean
Stacy: ok. Here’s something to consider. With us, you have 30 days to decide if you want to keep the service before you’re into your 2 yr. agreement. We do that to prove to people that we will do what we say we will do.
Stacy: I’ll bet that’s the reason Wild Blue doesn’t have that same offer.
you: What sustain that speed for 30 days and then let it go to hell and charge service call fees to “fix it”?
Stacy: you have half the speeds for about the same price, and your threshhold limits cut you down to dialup speeds for the rest of the month once you go over your threshhold
Stacy: again, Wild Blue is a start-up. We’ve been in business for 30 years.
you: You haven’t answere my question
Stacy: oops, sorry. I thought that was rhetorical. No, we don’t do that. lol
you: And I’ve been using computers to send data since the days when you used “Spider” to connect to someone
you: Si I’ll phone in to speak to a rep – okay?
Stacy: ah, ok, now I know what you mean by 1990s speeds. It’s a little different game out in the country.
Stacy: ok, nice chatting with you
Stacy: we really will take good care of you, I promise you that.
you: I’m not in the country – I’m near three major towns. In Australia I was in the country and I was getting more than 20Mbs
you: They will soon be on 100Mbs
Stacy: hmm. We’ll get there eventually
you: Not at 1Mbs for $60 you won’t – sorry – bye
Well this has been a very interesting website to say the least. We had WildBlue for almost 2 years now, and yes it sucks very badly. It’s is sad because that’s all we can get for “high speed” there are 2 tows very close to us; one provides unlimited wireless by a local company and the other DSL by Frontier. The problem is we can’t have neither. We have “none” line of sight if the wireless tower and Frontier refuses to give us their service because we are in Qwest territory (How dumb is that…) Anyways… we started out with the “Basic” Package next thing you know we are going with the “pro” and it’s not any better. It’s amazing how you call their support thing that they “suggest” you to switch over to the better package… In the first month of our service, we hit our bandwidth limit within less then a week. We called them immediately and the woman on the phone asked us what we were doing, all we did was doing regular surfing of the web, no gaming (which you can’t even do with WildBlue cause of the constant ping of 999 etc…) no downloading of any kind (like music, torrents, updates…) So I asked the woman what they “defined” as downloading and using your bandwidth… she told us it’s not just the things we download but also watching video’s (such as youtube), email, IM, Skype…etc. I couldn’t believe it! There is no way in hell 18000MB would be enough, especially with 3 people using the same connection! According to their tech support, 18000 is what a professional uses. I sure would like to know who that is… Just to make it through the month we don’t even download our Windows updates (Not a good thing…) One time, our bandwidth usage went to 116% of usage and we weren’t even home for months… Once we came back, we called their tech support again, the guy said that we could reset our bandwidth usage to 0% once every year. 2 months ago we got into a situation were went over the limit again, and there was no way of getting a higher package, so we asked to reset the bandwidth again because it was a new year, the woman said “sorry we can’t do that, you can only do that once in a life time…” What kind of crap is that??????? I got in so much trouble because I could not finish my work which had a deadline on it. Thanks for nothing, we pay so much money and the service is crap, and their support and understanding is even worse!
We have had every horrendous experience others are reporting on this page. It’s been awhile since we got rid of WB, but I have a relative who signed up recently and they are going through this nightmare now! I decided to check to see if there were any other complaints or class action suits and cannot believe that Hughes.Net and WB are both still doing their dishonest deeds. We had BOTH and I don’t have a lot of trust that any legal action will make a difference. I thought about contacting our government officials and trying to get something done. It is so sad to see so many unsuspecting people going through this nightmare scam. It would be wonderful to recoup our financial losses, but for us, it’s no longer about the money–but the injustice. I hope something is done before more people get robbed and deceived.
I’ve been a Wildblue Pro Plan customer for 5 years. Download data rate has been consistently superb at or above the advertised 1.5Mbps but upload speed has been consistently horrible at 1/4th the advertised 256Kbps throughout the entire 5 years I have used the service.
Each and every year I have filed complaints with Wildblue tech support about the upload data rate problem, having each and every complaint escalated to “upper management” without positive resolution from any of those complaints.
At last, DSL is available my area.
After 5 years, Wildblue will lose my business for blatant misrepresentation of their Pro Plan upload data rate capability.
By the way, Wildblue knew this issue would eventually come to a head so they covered their asses from the start in their Customer Agreement (section 8.3 Dispute Resolution) as follows – note the sentence “There shall be no class action lawsuit pursuant to this Agreement.”:
“Any action to enforce or construe the provisions of this Agreement shall be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts in Denver or Arapahoe County, Colorado, and the Parties hereby consent to the jurisdiction of these courts and agree that venue is proper in such courts. There shall be no class action lawsuit pursuant to this Agreement. Any cause of action brought by you, or by users of your account, with respect to the Service or this Agreement must be instituted within one year after the claim or cause of action has arisen or be barred. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply to this Agreement and it is acknowledged that this is a services contract and not a contract for the sale of goods.”
It has been a while since I read the entire contract, but I assume there is also a severability clause (allows removing of items by court or local jurisdictions without invalidating the rest of the agreement). The reason for this is because courts can overrule certain sections of a contract and those restrictions that limit legal recourse against a company are typically easily removed from contracts.
Congrats on getting DSL!
That’s good to know. I would love to see a class action suit against Wildblue for the upload data rate misrepresentation alone, not to mention other misrepresentations mentioned here.
I am only here to offer a perspective that stems from issues of a much greater concern than Wild Blue itself.
Yesterday, for me push finally came to shove.
Our ISP is an electric cooperative, which is essentially a customer of Wild Blue which it turns out is really just a product offered by it’s more sinister, money grabbing string of parent corporations.
I think anyone pursuing the idea of a class action, should pay less attention to their specific misgivings, and more attention to the way Wild Blue is setup from a corporate perspective. It really is the same story we are seeing in every other example of monopolization and centralizations of profit streams. The people accruing the top percentiles of earnings from the bills we pay each month are very few in number. Everything about their systems and services parallels the same chutzpah (coy, two-faced arrogance) that all modern white collar criminals revel in putting past us ignorant lemmings.
It’s as if they are begging to be taken to task for their nonsense. At the risk of sounding like a total conspiracy theorist, I must say that I cannot get away from how all of our once great communication services keep seeming to fall into the wrong hands. I get no sense that they intend to provide these services over the long haul. Or that they truly are laughing all the way to the bank. But what’s worse is the barely noticeable, amorphous kind of censorship it ultimately represents.
During an extended period of lightening last week, we had some near hits and a couple of brown outs. For the first time in 4 yrs with WB the modem failed to boot back up on it’s own. I did a reset and it did come back online but the next day we got a call from a woman with our ISP which is essentially also a customer or dealer of Wild Blue. I learned that the WB system basically spits out a list to the client ISP’s of the subscribers that are approaching their FUP limit. The ISP then becomes responsible for making the notification by phone. Which, get this, can be rather unnerving (spooky), since in our case the ISP is also our electricity provider. So I basically lay low for a few days and disconnected the modem for a few days to make sure no spyware or auto-updates could take place. Like any responsible customer would.
I’d exceeded the threshold only a couple times previously. I used to check the old horizontal graph of the rolling-30 which was barely decipherable but really, have I nothing better to do with my limited bandwidth, not to mention the slower than average time it takes for their server to push up the usage data. Which is curious in and of itself.
Anyway. After a few days it was still in the red despite the fact that we had visited out of the state for several of the last 30 days, and me knowing that our overall usage had to be down because we’ve been focusing on getting our garden in. So I called the 888 number for Wild Blue Tech Support that appears on the account home page.
It was 7:00am EST. A woman picked up at the call center in S. Carolina. After trying to eek out info as to when full speed would be restored, or why my usage graph was not updated WITHOUT needing to log on and view it, I was put on hold for a supervisor. After 5 mins of uninterrupted dead silence on the line, I hung up and called back. Same woman answered, apologized for the hold time, and finally the guy picked up. After repeating my concerns to him he offered to write up a ticket. Funny part is that even after he was unable to say when someone would follow up, that when the call did come, it was from some woman in charge of the Wild Blue stuff AT the ISP which is an electrical cooperative, a key targeted part of the wider satellite internet market.
We have the Pro level tier of service just to get decent speed.
As I explained to the ISP woman, what goes down hard is that even the tech support is a sub-contractor, with apparently no connected role with customer service, the latter being handled seperately by the ISP itself, with little to no staff experienced in mega conglomerate, modern mainstream media marketing strategies. God help us all if HughesNet is running the same shell game.
I’ll just close by pointing out that something is coming apart at Wild Blue. It’s just a hunch but I think the principles know they have recently been caught with their hands in something of an ethical cookie jar, and are planning to take the money and run.
In short I think the main issue here is the way they have passed off the FUP issues onto the ISPs to which they collect the fees. The software is intentionally primitive.
When we access our ISP login the URL kicks up to a ruralportal.net outfit. Another layer of name insulation. But our ISP is a sub-domain of that company. A quick visit to that reveals a very slick website being used to market the WB service to dealers, our ISP’s.
You can see how WB parents are trying to upsell various scripts and monitoring services to the ISPs (in house geeks if they even have one) that are dinky or petty or coniving or NWO connected enough to play god with the packet monitoring. About the only other thing the ISP does is to do the installations. Sparing WB that overhead too. Our ISP’s become subcontractors basically, just like the dumbed down excuse for true technical support.
Ok but so what peeved me off was learning that your (my) daily usage just keeps being calculated on the usage of the last day you log onto your metering data.
And that friends is a very clear testimony of premeditated theft. It becomes clear that the whole FUP ruse is designed mostly to discourage people from using the product they are paying for. It is WHY we are unable to decipher the data when we DO do the unnecessary dilligence of taking time (and bandwidth) to view it. Addmit it. You hit that red zone once, and deal with the dial up speed penalty, and you simply start cutting out web destinations.
As someone pointed out here, some people don’t just use the internet for entertainment and idle YouTube surfing. Even if you are a gamer you should be able to Beta test as many new versions of games as you want. Me, I collaborate on advertising projects. Edited photos and vids, all needing to be reviewed and re-reviewed remotely.
I mean, it’s absurd, that we would ostensibly have to log on, somehow, on the days when we are away from our pc’s, in order to have zero-usage days registered into the “rolling 30 days”.
I would say this class action would be a slam dunk.
How
A few years, when I was on ago I was looking for a hosting site for
I wish we could get a lawsuit going against this crook wildblue.. how can the amount need to be payed for every month under contract to get out of contract be more than your regular monthly bill. bunch of fn crooks……. pls help us alll somebody. consumers don deserve to be treated like wildblue treats ppl…
Count me in.
me too, count me in. I hope we can get some justice.
I just canceled my service with WB this afternoon. I even had my the card I gave them blocked. After I found out about the horrible comments on fb last night I just got sick to my stomach. I feel like I was got lucky this time. I didn’t have the dished installed yet. It reminded me of HughesNet. I battled with them for two years trying to get out of their contract. Thank you guys for posting your and sparing me the headache I felt when I was with HughesNet..
I just got Wildblue service a week and a half ago and i have been very unhappy with their service from day one i do speed tests and all i can get at best is 0.562 down and 0.03 up and i have the pro package.this is a nightmare and when they send someone out they say “well the modem is locked in and it is working i don’t now why it won’t go faster sir”.this is unacceptable as from what i remember of dial up it’s about 56k too and is only 9 bucks a month sign me up for the law suit because we need to get these scam artists put out of buisness and let them struggle to find a real job instead of ripping off hard working americans!!!!!!
It’s really too bad that we all had to lower our standards and put up with slow internet speeds delivered by Wildblue. Then to read all the stories of getting robbed after canceling the service. I’ve had Wildblue for about 5 years and plan to cancel this week, enough of this B.S. I’m very worried about getting billed after canceling and will talk to my bank about protecting my money. Sign me up for a class action, Wildblue should be put out of business for fraud.
I have been continually ripped off by these folks the speed is less than half of what I pay for. I was told I have exceeded my down load alotment and when I explained I did not do any down loads they directed me to their web site. When trying to cancel them it was and still is very difficult to get anyone to answer. A law suite would be great! count me in. These are some dirty, lieing theives that need to be addressed and put out of business
We have been customers of Wild Blue for several years and the service has always been horrible but in the last few years it became unusable. We were on the phone with support constantly and they would walk us through the SAME steps time after time and nothing would change. (Server is not responding). We even took our PC to the repair shop thinking that could be part of the problem. Nothing wrong. We thought about changing to Hughes for years but didn’t want to be locked into a 2 year contract if something better came along. We live in a rural area. So we continued with Wild Blue and was only utilizing it for emails and only 5% of what we could use. We were told by COTC (who was our contact) that they had been told they could not sell any more subscriptions! They had way too many for what their FEW satellites could support. Every time we had to pay them each month, I would have to grit my teeth to pay that fee. My husband told them on the phone on numerous occasions that they topped the list for the worst rip off. We finally decided that even if we were locked into a 2 year contract, it could not be any worse and we had to have some kind of service so we went ahead and changed to Hughes. THE BEST MOVE WE EVER MADE. I can’t believe we waited this long. So far, we are very pleased with Hughes. I hope there will be a class action lawsuit against Wild Blue because it is pitiful how many years they have ripped off customers!Someone needs to knock them out of business.
Count me in they are Ripped off.
Has a class action suit been filed yet against this company. After all the research on the net, it would seem there would be many that could join. New to Wild Blue and they are awful. Worse ever. We are currently operating on dial up because they sent a warning saying we were using it too much. Their service sucked from day one and so has the internet access. They just gave my man the run around and now he agreed to something I fear is going to be a huge loss with the $450 up front for their ‘NEW’ equipment. Change.org would be a great place to assemble people. Wild Blue is taking advantage of people! Some people have said you can’t do anything about their service because it’s in their service agreement. B.S.
You can report them to the National Consumer League and if they get enough complaints they investigate and then move forward with a class action suit. http://www.nclnet.org/
http://www.girardgibbs.com/how-do-i-start-a-class-action-lawsuit.asp
I have hundreds of people who have replied to me with their information to join a class action. Unfortunately, I have yet to find an attorney to take it. I have some locally that would love to but classes are not allowed in my state which makes things a bit more difficult.
just wanted to let everyone know that me and my family also made the mistake of signing up with wildblue internet service a few years ago, and believe me we havent forgot. They lie about your data usage and charge you for going over the “limit”, even when you arent even using the internet. After they tell you your going over your usage, they limit you to dial up speeds and have the gaul to charge you even more. All this trouble for a such a sh** service. I would love to see this company fail, and hope to one day see this suit come through!