Archive for 2010

Wildblue Satellite/ViaSat FAP – by Todd

This was a comment on one of the threads but I thought it deserved its own post:

Thanks to the creator of “WildBlueSucks.Info”!!!

I’ve had the misfortune of being a Wildblue Internet Satellite customer since December 2007. I work from my home, and choose to live in a rural area, and satellite Internet is the only “non-dial-up” Internet access option I have. From talking with other local Wildblue and HughesNET customers, apparently both providers are a bird of the same feather regarding the FAP (Fair Access Policy). During the sales process of attracting customers like me, Internet satellite providers certainly don’t talk about the sharp white teeth of the FAP. Unfortunately, I misunderstood what how the FAP works, I thought it was like our cell phone providers where the number of available airtime minutes resets at the end of each month and/or cycle. This is NOT the way the FAP works – BUYER BEWARE!!!

My work requires me to use an online back-up solution (Carbonite.Com), and this process kills the miniscule upload limitations of the FAP for my service option – i.e. 5.0GB. I log daily my usage from the Wildblue bandwidth monitor – http://www.wildblue.com/myaccount/index.jsp – and have found the following hard truths about WildBlue’s FAP:

1. WildBlue’s tech support lies about how this “bandwidth monitor” works. They have admitted to me that it does not reflect “real-time” measurements of your actual usage. Thus a responsible person cannot accurately monitor / manage keeping out of the FAP penalty box.

2. I keep a daily log of actual “bandwidth monitor” screen-shots and track that data in an Excel spreadsheet. There is no precise methodology that I have found / observed as to how WildBlue’s FAP translates into actual available bandwidth to users. For example, since March of 2008, my upload bandwidth usage averages 3.3GB at any one given time. This means that although I’m paying for 5.0GB of up upload bandwidth in my monthly Wildblue service fee, I’m only able to access / use 1.7GB of uploading bandwidth at any given time. In other words, I do not have access to the remaining 3.3GB of upload bandwidth I’m paying for because of the FAP’s methodology of how it measures what you’ve historically used and sets that unchangeable number to what’s left in your service plan’s upload availability. Again, this number never resets back to zero, thus I’m paying for 5.0GB of upload bandwidth capacity, but Wildblue only grants me access to 1.7GB of that 5.0GB based on my past usage – NOTE: This is the same for the “download” bandwidth levels as well. To explain my point, WildBlue’s FAP is like buying all your stuff at the “company store”, you make $100, but your paycheck is only $30, because the rest they’ve laid claim to for past goods purchased / used.

3. When confronting Wildblue about their FAP violation, here’s what I went through:

a. Tech support – no help on this issue, and they refused to connect me with anyone above the person who answered the phone.

b. I was not able to find a Wildblue Communications corporate phone number; then found that they were purchased by a company called ViaSat in San Diego, CA (Chief Executive Officer is Mark D. Dankberg). Eventually, I tried requesting information from Wildblue about “commercial” grade services with more bandwidth. In essence here were my options:

i. I would have to go to another company who’s a reseller of Wildblue Internet satellite services

ii. Pay two-times more per month for a few GB’s more bandwidth monthly and no increased speed (upload or download)

iii. This would require me having to buy out the remainder of my existing Wildblue contract (no transfers)
iv. Pay for additional service / set-up charges with the new company to get the same service I’m currently getting but with increased

v. Have to get a new Email address

vi. Still have to deal with Wildblue’s “bandwidth monitor” requirements

vii. Good deal eh?

c. When you go into FAP violation, they “throttle” back your bandwidth speed to that of dial-up. When I asked Wildblue how long will I be in the penalty box, they cannot / will not give an answer. They have a magic formula that they apparently can’t share with the customer as they simply state; it depends on your upload/download usage. So I asked the question, “If I do not turn on my computer, and no one else is using the Wildblue Internet connection, how long will I be in penalty box / violation?” They cannot or will not answer that question. I finally pressed a Wildblue sales guy at their Colorado (former headquarters) office hard enough that he told me about two-weeks based on how much I went over my upload quota. My job afforded me the luxury of scheduling a 2-week business trip, and upon my return, I was still in the FAP penalty box. It took 15 days to have the “normal speed” turned back on. Effing amazing!!!!

I pray for the day I have an alternative to dial-up and Wildblue here in my area (South Dakota). I hope that day comes soon! Wildblue / ViaSat in my experience, engage in dishonorable and unethical business practices. I accept 100% responsibility for my actions of signing up for this service, and have done everything in my power to try to understand Wildblue’s business practices, and do my best to be a good steward of our agreement. However, Wildblue’s actions are vastly different from their intentions, and misleading the customer is their true business model, not providing a good Internet access service to honest paying customers!

Former WildBlue Tech Support Agent

The following post was written by a former tech support agent for WildBlue Satellite Internet service. This website takes no responsibility for the accuracy or content of the message and has not confirmed the validity of the post (not that WildBlue would confirm it) so please use at your own risk.

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.