Another Disgruntled Wildblue Customer in Arkansas
This was sent to me by Lisa in AR and wanted to spread the word about WildBlue so, being more “to the point”, here is her story:
I decided to go television/cable free and watch my programs on Netflix and Hulu. Evidently I’m the only person in the world that doesn’t know that satellite internet doesn’t do live streaming video; the salesman assured me there would be no problem, sold me the high tier package, and then gave me a phone number to call back if there were a problem: turns out the phone number he gave me is the number for United Healthcare Medical Insurance!
AFter a week of total frustration and many calls to Wildblue, Internet Explorer and Netflix, I cancelled, requesting my initial set-up fee and monthly charge to be refunded and the early termination fees to be waived. The man I talked to in the cancellation department assured me that if the recorded call did indeed indicate that the salesman mis-represented what satellite internet was capable of, that I would get my money back. He gave me a ticket number and told me to call back in two days.
I called back, and was told by a Supervisor (after requesting one) that no, I would not get my money back, that the recorded call could not be listened to as it was “corrupted somehow” and that they would waive the early termination fees and that’s all. I am out 111.00 for the initial set-up, $165 for the pole mount, and 84.95 for the first months service—unbelievable. More than $300 for one week of frustration and no service! Wildblue is not an ethical company, does not stand behind their product or service, and should be boycotted—SPREAD THE WORD!
I feel your pain! I have had nothing but problems with wild blue. Seems they have a nice racket going. Blame your computer, microsoft, not mention that they have oversold their bandwith. The company does not work with it’s local installers. Does not back their work and has nothing but excuses for the fact that they do not provide service on any kind of consistant basis. My dial up service was much more reliable and cost a fraction of the amount. So far nothing but frustration here. I thought by getting wildblue I could do more faster since I have no other option out here in the country. Boy, was I ever wrong. Now I am stuck in a contract that delivers slower service than my dialup that cost a fraction of the price.
Frustrated teacher that needs to be connected.
Colleen
Lisa,
Sorry for your troubles. Unfortunately you are not alone in this type of experience. I run a website about WildBlue’s poor service and have had many current and former dissatisfied WildBlue customers contact me with similar WildBlue horror stories. A few of them did say that they got better response from WildBlue after they reported their troubles to their local Better Business Bureaus or state government consumer portection agencies. You may want to try this as it may lead to getting a full refund since it appears WildBlue or it’s sales agents may have misled you with false information. I hope you are able to get all or your money back. Good luck.
Ed
admin for WildBlue-Sucks.com
I got suckered in to WB, I didn’t have access to the internet at all to do any research when WB was suggested to me via DirectTV and AT&T. I ended up getting Dish, the rep with Dish said I could bundle WB/Dish so I tried; Dish couldn’t do it, and told me WB had to do it, WB told me that I would have to have new equipment, new installation, pay the cancellation fees and what ever else to get WB bundled with Dish. I was also not aware nor was I made aware of the speeds when I initially talked to WB, they sent the equipment within 24 hours, at which point they could have taken $300.00 hostage until I sent the equipment back if I had changed my mind about having WB installed. They charged me for the installation two weeks before it was actually done, and was I seriously disappointed when I finally got on the internet with WB. I never physically signed anything with WB as I did when Dish was installed, I wonder if that would help my case any? I also hate the fact that the only payment method is an automatic withdrawal from my checking account, there is something fishy about that, again; I was not made aware of that fact when I initially ordered WB.
Wild blue is at it again was offline for 2 weeks and still got hit with two fap violations with my net connections disabled i have since the first of October only uploaded 200mbs worth of video for my ministry and in september i ul 200mb of video I have dl for sept 7gb and october dl 200mb then whamm they combined septembers and octobers uploads and downloads for it to be not reset even after the billing cycles have changed they still have me at 86% upload and almost 6 gbs as of 10/31/2009 even though I have been in an offline status and Throttled even not able to browse until 1 am to 10 am at all i have had but 12 day’s worth of october When you get this lawsuit started let me know as a pastor I know i shouldn’t jump on board however I have never even came close to what was promised by the rep at universe cellular and dish Watertown NY or wild Blue Directly I cannot even upload My test scores for ames internation school of ministry LET Me KNOW HIGHLY UPSET IN NEW YORK Pastor George M.
I used to work for them in the billing department. I was not happy with the things I saw. Anyone have any questions I can answer them. I felt like the customers were being lied to and took a course for employees which was all about positive spin. If anyone is interested they can post questions and I will answer all. I know why these problems happen.
Hey Blue Gill,
Thanks for the offer but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist or an insider to figure out that a crooked corporation like WildBlue can make tons of money by not providing reliable Internet access for a high monthly price to people living in places with no other real Internet access alternatives, in a country where the government’s elected representatives protect, aid and abet large, predatory corporations like WildBlue in such practices. As usual, the consumer gets screwed, the corporation and the shareholders profit, the politicians get big quid pro quo campaign donations, and the lawyers get the money from both sides should there be any class action lawsuits. God bless corporate America and her legally-bribed political servants for making all of this chicanery possible and so darned profitable! What a wonderful thing…for a few.
Wildblue cost me $60.00 in overdraft fees from an automatic payment that was not supposed to go through until they actually connected my service. So aside from being one of the slowest internet services I have ever experienced, rude and sometimes incompetent customer service and the inability to communicate important information, they refuse to take any responsibility for their own mistakes. This is one of the worst internet services I have experienced! If I could cancel right now I would!
I had a posting titled Wildblue Sucks about 2003 back then I was the first one. Guess I started a trend here. I see many complaints about the service and slowness of the connections however, no one has explained why the slowness. Back then they had an “abuse policy” where they would dial down your connection speed if you surpassed D/L KB’s ratio they allowed. They love this because they can turn around and re-sell your unused bandwidth to someone else. You get about a 1/4 of what your paying for kinda like a dial-up connection not much good for anything except email. After all this time they are still ignoring requests for refunds and contract cancellations. How and the hell are they getting away with this crap.
Well, i am at least putting on a brave face. We have had it for 24 HOURS… and even though it will cost a lot to break the contract… we’re outta here! WildBlue SUCKS! They NEVER mentioned on ordering this piece of crap… until the guy was here intalling it… that it has a cap on bandwidth. Can’t watch streaming NetFlix or streaming Sony. Can’t play muti-player PS3 games (the only reason we have one is for this reason and downloading movies. So now our PS3 is useless to us…) Can’t download movies or you hit the cap after 1 BluRay download… which takes 2 days by the way.. it’s so patheticly slow. Can’t use our verizon network expander for our cell phones. Basicly… the MOST EXPENSIVE SATALITE SERVICE OUT THERE…. just blows. Hard. Save your money, time, frustration and find something else. Even dial-up is better than this! NO!! REALLY!!! Dial up is FASTER than this WildBlue turd. I so wish I saw this before we ordered it. It’s so patheticly bad… I’m lost for words right now.
FORMER WILDBLUE TECHNICAL SUPPORT AGENT
I was just terminated today July 26, 2010 from Wildblue.
The reason for my termination was that I took a telephone call from an angry customer that was told that Wildblue was 10 times faster than Cable and DSL.
I told the customer that that statement was not true and we were slower than cable and dsl.
I also asked the customer if she had cable or dsl available in here area.
For telling the customer that wildblue was slower than DSL/cable and asking her if she had DSL/Cable in here area, I was terminated.
If a customer called with slow speeds, we were just instructed to have them fill out 2 forms called Information Gathering (http://help.wildblue.net/care/article/4113&n=1) and Slow Connectivity (http://help.wildblue.net/care/article/4117&n=4). We also had to open a ticket which we would close at the end of the call and give a ticket number to the customer. We would have the customer log on to toast.net to perform 3 speed tests. Once speed came back lower than the customer was paying for, we told the customer the following: Speeds are not guaranteed. Your rate plan has UP TO 1.5mbps (for pro), 1.0mbps (select), 512kbps (value). The actual Wildblue average for Value was 200kbps, Select 500kbps, Pro 900kbps. We would tell the customer everything was working fine as long as they were close to average. If they were not close to average, we would make up some story about how testing at toast.net is never 100% accurate, or it was the web hosts problem like hostrocket, yahoo, godaddy and not our problem. We would then get the customer off the telephone and move on to our next call.
Our Fair Access Policy was horrible as well. It was a rolling 30 day period which means it could go to 2 different billing cycles and never start over at the time your new bill is paid. It pretty much went back 30 days from each day. Example, if today is July 26, 2010, it took usage from June 27th, 2010 to today.
Hughes net gives you unlimited downloading between the hours of 1am to 6am. We never had any unlimited downloading.
Our system was horrible when it was cloudy, snowing, raining, pretty much horrible all together.
I assisted customers with technicians not showing up, modem being offline, customers calling after 3 months of install and into a contract and having to pay $95 to have a technician come out and fix a faulty install (I should say wind storm instead of faulty install since we never would blame our technicians for a bad install we always had to ask if they had storms lately, etc)
We would give you a free Discount Repair Program, Month of Service and Service call if you said the Magic Words, “I am going to cancel”. Pretty much “I am going to cancel” is the statement you need to use to get things free from Wildblue.
We had 3 different systems we would use. Infinys (name of our Billing Program), Support Portal (name of our system that can see if your service is up and running) and CIMS (the system to initially look up the customer). Link to Infinys is https://portal.servicecenter.wildblue.net:8772/go?to=UA_Signin&from=dummy&task=dummy&redirectFlag=true Support Portal https://portal.servicecenter.wildblue.net/ and CIMS https://cims.wildblue.cust-serv.com/WildBlueCims/login.aspx
Infinys was a program designed by Convergys. I am not sure who designed Support Portal and CIMS.
The customer knowledge base was help.wildblue.net/kb/ The employees knowledge base was help.wildblue.net/care/
The Wildblue default installer ID was 34853836. We would always have to use then when customers were suspended for the system not letting them sign the customer agreement. This happened all the time.
When a customer called to pay a bill we would process it in the Infinys program and we never had a confirmation number since I do not believe the charge was instant. So pretty much you could call with an invalid credit card or one with insufficient funds and we would turn you back on and not know about it for a day or so.
The simple fact of the matter is that Wildblue was not a very good service. People constantly called with problems and forget about getting online if it is Cloudy or raining. Also forget about getting decent speeds in some areas because they have way too many people on a circuit than they should have.
We were trained to always Apologize to the customer and try and talk nice to them under any circumstance. We always had to say at the end of the call “For your convenience, you can chat live with us at wildblue.net” This always seemed to make the customers get mad and they would say, “I would if I had internet service, etc”
So I guess if I were stuck living out in the Country I would probably choose HughesNet. #1 because they are a KU BAND service which works in the rain/clouds, #2 they have been around longer #3 Commerical businesses use them, #4 From talking to our customers they always talked about having hughesnet in the past and it sounded like a much better system from what they described. (I did use HughesNet back in the 90′s when it was one way receive only. It worked pretty good
actually)
Hope this helps clear up everything with WildBlue.
Failure to read your contract or do ANY research to see if you could actually stream video doesn’t make wildblue a bad company, it makes you an idiot and a whiner. “But nobody told me!” Boo hoo. Nice victim mentality. Predatory lenders, check cashing stores, cell phone contracts, someone has to protect us from them! We’re not smart enough to protect ourselves! W
What a bunch of whiners. Did you really think you could download a blue ray movie at 1.5mbs? Did you not learn basic math in school? Buy a calculator and stop pretending someone mislead you.
Todd, While I agree that the service is not meant for Dave and Kim’s specific use, to categorize everything off one comment is a bit, well, idiotic.
Now, I see that you are coming to us from a wildblue IP address so that tells me that you are either an employee – or you are one of the very few people that have decent service with wildblue. I am doubting it it the latter since you ended up on a “WildBlue Sucks” website
The problem I have (had) with wilblue is that they falsely advertise their speeds, use second-rate installers, and have a horrible contractual policy that basically tiers the agreement so you are bound to them for a year. They advertise (or at least they used to – I have not checked out their website in some time) their speeds as comparable download speeds to Cable or DSL, yet with the latency, basic surfing is quicker through dial-up (yes, I have ran tests to support this theory – albeit not the most scientific, but enough to cure my own senses).
I agree with some of your sentiments of consumer protection because I get quite frustrated with people who try to blame their problems on others or their inability to read an agreement on others, but this company (wildblue) blatantly lied to their customers – there is no excuse for that and it is something that they need to be reprimanded for.