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.

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A few years, when I was on ago I was looking for a hosting site for

Congrats on getting DSL!