My Thoughts On Wild Blue Internet Service

Wild Blue satellite internet service. Wow! That sounds so progressive doesn't it? I'm here to tell you it's NOT. My family lives in a rural area (moved here from a small city) where there is no access to cable, we have one electric company (Entergy) and you can only see fields and the occassional house as you look around you. We live 15 minutes outside town. We have a friend who lives 10 minutes outside town. This friend has cable service and therefore gets his internet through cable. His cable works as long as his electricity works. That means his internet service works the same way. He is also with a different electric company. Their electricity rarely goes out. (Now, my "bone to pick" mainly focuses on Wild Blue but Entergy doesn't have too much of my respect either, since you just have to look at a telephone pole to cause the electricity to go out.)

On to internet stuff...

Now, we have a friend who lives 15 minutes away from us and closer to the next town on the highway. They use an internet service that utilizes cell towers to bounce a signal. It works fairly well and the cost is minimal compared to what we pay for our service. You might say, with my friends' internet services, you get what you pay for.

Our family is online quite a lot. We have many friends who are only available to us online, simply because our schedules differ so much. We share lots of photos and check out lots of their photos. I access many educational sites to expand what I'm teaching my kids. (I school them at home.)

We did attempt to try another way of getting internet access but we weren't able to use the "cell tower" service because there were too many trees in the way. (And I'm sorry! I'm not cutting down a tree that's worked so hard to get to the immense height it has achieved just so I can pay some company that could care less!) And, as I stated before, the cable service doesn't extend out to our house.

Here are the facts about our Wild Blue service: ProPack-$89.95/mo will get you 17,000 MB download threshold; 5,000 MB upload threshold. (I chose this pack b/c we are online all the time.)
ValuePak-$49.95/mo will get you 7,500 MB download threshold; 2,300 MB upload threshold
SelectPak-(I dont' know the cost for this one exactly but I think it's around $59 or $69/mo) will get you 12,000 MB download threshold; 3,000 MB upload threshold

They also tell you that if you excede the thresholds their "Fair Access Policy" kicks in and slows you down to 128 kbps for downloads and 28 kbps for uploads, which of course is their way of saying "Ha! Ha! You can't work on your computer any more." Now, they tell you all this before you sign up. (To their credit and probably a great savings in their pockets)

All plans come with this "guarantee."-(In my experience)-Cloudy day? Facebook, Google, MySpace, YouTube...they all won't work. Blogger, yeah it won't work either.

Now, that's not all! They make you sign a 2 year contract. If you want out of the contract, you owe the remaining monthly payments up to the month when your contract ends TIMES $15! Can you say "racket"? Because, they sure have one here. You wanna know something else? If you call in your question to tech help, they charge you for the call! They want you to chat with them online, instead. Now this would be fine except our service is so intermittent and it takes so long for the signals to relay, that we aren't able to carry on a chat for any length of time. If you are on my facebook or myspace or google chat list and have tried chatting with me, you know what I'm talking about. We can't run any of the programs we usually run without having problems. We definitely can't use the new apps and gadgets like we should be able to. It's absolutely ridiculous!

I simply cannot believe that in order for my family to continue with the level of internet service we were used to in Texas, we have to pay almost double and our service sucks royally in comparison. In the immortal words of the 77's... "You get what you pay for. Did I pay for this?" I paid more so I could do more and I still can't do more! It's a really good thing that I don't run an in home biz that requires the use of the internet b/c I'd be out of a job! That about sums up my feelings on Wild Blue.

And a last bit of advice, if you have any other option than Wild Blue, TAKE IT! Dial up is better because at least then, you are getting what you pay for. I I'm paying for platinum and getting limestone. For my $90/mo, I should get much better service, don't you think?