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Review by levis76 See Profile

  • Location: Sterling Heights, Macomb, MI, USA
  • Cost: $120 per month (24 month contract)
Installer was on time and courteous.
TV signal breaks up constantly, Internet is slow, wifi is terrible
DO NOT switch/sign up to WOW! Explore other options.
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

I'll start with the positives. The installer was on time, courteous, and clean. He was a contractor though, not an actual WOW! employee. He had everything installed and working fairly quickly and gave me an excellent walkthrough on how to navigate the different guides and operate the Media Gateway. He had to run a new drop to the box in the neighbors yard and ran the cable down along the fence line. He was nice enough to advise me to bury it myself because the contractors that do it do a hack job and wouldn't be here to do it till spring if they came at all.

It was all downhill after that. About an hour after he left the wifi dropped out completely. I could connect to my neighbors wifi through Comcast, but our own was just not working. I reset the gateway several times and before becoming utterly frustrated I attempted to call WOW! customer support. Yeah right. I got a busy signal the first several times before I finally got the automated message that they are going through a system upgrade and therefore phone wait times could be longer than usual. I put the phone on speaker and waited while I continued to mess with the system. 35min on hold and the line went dead. Tried again and 40min wait with same result, line went dead. I finally got the wifi working by tweaking all of the settings until I found a configuration that seemed to work. Now the wifi works but it's very weak.

The wired internet connection speed seems to be pretty stable, but it really is not. I can't watch streaming videos from any site, YouTube, ABC, NBC, Netflix, Disney, etc. A video will start and approx 1 min in it will stop and buffer for several minutes. When it does begin to play it'll run for a few seconds and buffer again. Watching the network traffic on my PC, there isn't any. It's buffering and not d/l'ing a darn thing. Then suddenly, there will be a burst of traffic and a few seconds will play. Maddening. Especially when I can connect to my neighbor's wifi and watch the same video seemlessly in HD. Occasionally during the day, my 5yr old will be able to watch videos on Sprout or Disney without any issues, but more often than not she can't and that is unacceptable.

The cable TV picture quality is fantastic. The audio is quite a bit louder than the U-Verse, which required me to adjust the audio settings on the TV itself. Both of these of course are entirely dependent on whether the incoming signal isn't corrupted. My local signal strength is always great, but more often than not prime time programming starts pixelating and audio stutters. Sometimes it actually drops out entirely and gives us a lost signal screen for several minutes. We have had many recorded programs corrupted as such and we are left with little options to catch up on our favorite shows when this happens since watching videos online has become an exercise in futility.

Overall, we are very dissatisfied with the service we have been provided thus far and are looking into other options, but more than likely we will be switching back to U-Verse by the end of the week unless we see a drastic improvement in both services.

member for 11.2 years, 4 visits, last login: 11.1 years ago
lodged 11.2 years ago