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Review by abcbca123321 See Profile

  • Location: Union City, Branch, MI, USA
  • Cost: $180 per month
Works 80% of the time (Should be a bad... but i needed something)
One of the worst internet providers, extremely slow at fixing things, cable freezes often, and they lie on their website
Slogan: You'll be wow!'d at how bad it is! Almost anythings better.
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

So after having the internet slow down to 2Mbps (we payed for 30 and got 60. Probably some sort of upgrade thing caused everyones internet speed to upgrade?) I looked on their site. I filtered location to mid Michigan and looked at speed. They advertised up to 1 Gbps downloads at about the price of what 110Mbps use to cost. I looked under their deals and found they were offering $75 with a 2 year plan for 100 down and medium TV or $95 without a 2 year plan and we at the time payed $130 a month (for medium TV probably and 30 or 60 download). We decided to call them and go for that bundle plan and they essentially said we'd be paying $180 (asked for a deal and it went down to $160 for a year) for what they advertised as a $95 plan. Check below for "Pricing Update" for more information.

Internet:

Overpriced and goes out constantly. See below for screenshots/downtime.

TV:

Goes out between 12AM and 12PM for a few hours each day and then is fine with the exception of it freezing every 30 minutes for a few seconds.

Update: I found out quite recently that WOW has a Twitter @wow_way and @wowcare of where they rarely respond to people especially if you are in an area that they could care less about.

Update 2: We've called them about 5 times now where they seem to have fallen in love with saying "Is you fault! Get rid of mouse that unplug you stuff and plug it back in repeatedly many time second only in morning." In reality thought it goes more like this "Something is wrong with YOUR house no one else is having this issue (except everyone on your street at the very least). We want to send a guy to your house to replace all the wires in it like they did with your neighbor which didn't fix anything but we will continue doing it until it comes back so we can say we fixed it until you call us tomorrow saying it isn't fixed." I added a few words though explaining what will happen.

We've decided that if WOW continues to be trash until we get some money (in a few weeks) that we're going to switch to Frontier. Even though their speeds are slower at the very least I have this feeling that it will work 99% of the time.

Update 3: We got in contact with a superior and they sent someone out to check the lines. They found nothing the first day, the 2nd day they found that our house was putting out a lot of noise and replaced the wire that goes to the telephone pole, and the 3rd day they came out and checked the wires in our house. It fixed it for a solid 6 days (more likely it was just their weekly "lets actually have no issues" week.) and now has gone back to being normal with the exception is that it seems like instead of every morning it's going to likely be every afternoon.

Pricing update: I found out recently that all of WOW's pricing on their website are complete lies UNLESS you are a NEW customer. They could care less about their old customers. Also to get correct speeds for your areas you need to CALL them and ignore their website.

Conclusion: It's sad that they lie very hard about their prices. I guess they hope to get people to call in and sweet talk them? I'd suggest going with any other company and if you don't have any gamers in the house go for satellite as they will have much better reliability(in my experience).

Side note: I plan to update this every time with a screenshot of the download speed when it goes down (if possible).

Downtimes/Screenshots:

»docs.google.com/document ··· =sharing

I should probably clarify that I don't have any sort of program doing this so I have probably missed more than half of them.

Old story(summed up):

Was getting like 1/3 what payed for and 0.0001 Mbps up. Called tech support 3 times and they couldn't fix it. Found a broken box at neighbors house and the upload speed was fixed. Complained here and someone figured out that the servers were very outdated and overloaded (I assume) and about 2 weeks later it was fixed and the internet speed was also upgraded to a max of 110 from previous 15. This was back in 2013.

member for 10.1 years, 72 visits, last login: 3.1 years ago
updated 6.2 years ago


gene r
@cox.net

7 recommendations

gene r

Anon

wow

if wow is bad, you haven't had comcast, cox, or any other the dish networks. i find wow, quick, accurate, and good to deal with.
Tony0945
join:2015-03-26
Streamwood, IL

3 recommendations

Tony0945

Member

Yeah, TV bad

I'm running on antenna 50% of the time. If I get the hang of streaming, WOW TV is gone. I'm going to get a trial from AT&T on internet only. If it is reliable, goodbye to WOW.

Once I had TV, phone and internet and praised WOW. Now it is garbage.

Anon75f3d
@rr.com

Anon75f3d

Anon

Re: Yeah, TV bad

AT&T doesn't have trial internet services. You either have service or not. Lol. You still pay for what you use regardless. And generally they don't have contracts.
Tony0945
join:2015-03-26
Streamwood, IL

Tony0945

Member

Re: Yeah, TV bad

Well, they sent a mailing, offering 50/5 for 12 months for $30. Sounds like a contract to me. If I'm not bound, better yet. Maybe WOW will return to their former good level of service with new management, now that the vulture capitalists have had their IPO.

Their website says no extra fees under 1T. I don't game and most watching is OTA. Don't think I'll exceed the quota.
classicnote
join:2016-05-09
Glen Ellyn, IL

classicnote to Tony0945

Member

to Tony0945
For sure. If you live near a big city, an antenna is the way to go to be less reliant on WOW (or any cable company). The FCC mandate to broadcasters to provide free TV is something we should take advantage of.
drfsite
join:2017-10-15

drfsite to Tony0945

Member

to Tony0945
That was my only real issue with WOW... the phone service - after the upgrade to DOCSIS3, they started charging us modem rental fees, as well as only providing modems with crappy built-in routers. They refused to let us use our own telephony modem, even though you can easily buy them. Had a tech come out and everything, and was given "no, we can't" by the company. Fought with them several times on this, they cited some FCC policy about e911, which does not exist - and to the contrary, the FCC says ISPs must let you use your own equipment if it's compatible.

Eventually just gave up the fight, cancelled our phone service with WOW and transferred the numbers to cheaper VOIP providers. Using an OBI202 now and it works fine. Plus a NON ROUTER modem that we bought upfront, no stupid lease fees.
drfsite

1 recommendation

drfsite

Member

reply

Not that WOW is the best company in the world or anything, but their customer service is a TON better than other companies I've worked with. Reliability itself isn't great, but in Michigan nothing is due to the constant power outages, snowstorms etc.

I'm going to assume OP wasn't using their own modem, and that might be a big part of the issue... never use a cable company's rental modem.

As far as TV packages go, WOW's is the best. Only 3 options, not 6+ like satellite and other cable providers. We've had them since 2001 when it was called WideOpenWest and other than the occasionally increased prices (which again, all ISPs do, they aren't unique in that) it's been really great.
abcbca123321
join:2014-02-18
Union City, MI

abcbca123321

Member

Re: reply

said by drfsite:

Not that WOW is the best company in the world or anything, but their customer service is a TON better than other companies I've worked with. Reliability itself isn't great, but in Michigan nothing is due to the constant power outages, snowstorms etc.

I'm going to assume OP wasn't using their own modem, and that might be a big part of the issue... never use a cable company's rental modem.

As far as TV packages go, WOW's is the best. Only 3 options, not 6+ like satellite and other cable providers. We've had them since 2001 when it was called WideOpenWest and other than the occasionally increased prices (which again, all ISPs do, they aren't unique in that) it's been really great.

Actually apparently the modem they have given us according to others on the forum (years ago) is quite good and fairly new. Although the wifi can only do 30Mbps it seems.
TheBaconBox
join:2015-07-20

TheBaconBox

Member

Check your task manager

This might sound stupid, but did you check to see if any of your computers are downloading updates or if some system processes are using a large amount of bandwidth?
abcbca123321
join:2014-02-18
Union City, MI

abcbca123321

Member

Re: Check your task manager

said by TheBaconBox:

This might sound stupid, but did you check to see if any of your computers are downloading updates or if some system processes are using a large amount of bandwidth?

Actually I have and no they are not. For the most part it's only 1 computer and 2-3 phones on at once.