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.

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.

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.