my thoughts, musings, rants and discoveries . . .

Around a month ago I wrote a post about the problems I was having with my Wildblue service. Whenever I would try to pull up certain frequently accessed sites, I would get a wild error message in my browser indicating that the connection had to be reset while loading the page. Sometimes I would get as far as getting a little bit of text. But most of the time I wouldn’t be able to see the site at all. The problem had gone on for quite some time and I had filed numerous complaints.

Anyway, I’m ready to provide an update. I filed my last complaint on Feb 4th. And I received this email response from them on Feb 6th:

Thank you for contacting WildBlue Communications. One of our Agents will respond to your message, if applicable, as soon as possible. If you have a specific question, you may find your answer by visiting our web site’s Question & Answers section by clicking on the following link: http://www.wildblue.com/aboutWildblue/qaa.jsp— WildBlue Support

Well, that was pretty much it until Feb 19th. That was the next message basically saying they’ve checked things out and couldn’t find anything wrong on their end. Truth be told, the problem wasn’t completely gone, but was getting better. A couple of sites I couldn’t read in over a month were now readable again. But I wouldn’t attribute this to their overwhelmingly great customer service. Chalk it up, instead, to accident.

So, things are great again. Huh? Not so much. A new problem has occurred in place of this one. Lately, I’ve been experiencing outages. In fact, I had two of them yesterday. It’s a lot of fun calling up to see what’s going on. In all cases they have no idea when service will be restored. Great!

Needless to say, I’ve found a remedy. I’ve now signed up to have a T1 installed here. That should provide me guaranteed 1.5Mb/sec uploads and downloads. It’s expensive, though, at $599 per month. Other areas are able to get such service for as low as $350 per month. But living in the mountains has its advantages and disadvantages. I worked things out, though, and it looks like I can pretty much wrap up a bunch of other services I’m paying for into this one and actually save some money each month over my current expenses. More importantly, I need this for my business so that my engineering group can access my servers and collaborate on software development. I wish I could have done it for cheaper however. At least this is an option for me. And for Wildblue… see ya!