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Review by YellowHammer 
UPDATED: 1.8 years ago
member for 4.9 years, 388 visits, last login: 19 days ago
 Jackson,Clarke,AL
 Contract price not specified.
 "When it works, it works well"
 "Outages during heavy rain. Gaming no longer works."
 "Only if it's your last resort."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I've updated my review several times. To read my lastest comments, scroll to the bottom.
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Original post - August 2006. I had been stuck with dialup forever. I can't get cable or DSL or Wireless. For 4 years I considered signing with DirecWay, but did not because of their FAP policy. DW limited the size of your downloads to around 100MB per day. (I'm not sure if it is still that way). I couldn't tolerate that kind of policy. I also found that the user community seemed to be fairly unhappy.
Starband was in a state of flux, having just lost their contract on a satellite. Many of their users were without service. They seemed to have one foot in the grave.
When Wildblue came out, I was very skeptical. But they were cheaper than DW, and the user community seemed happy enough, with a small but vocal unhappy crowd. The install went well (NRTC) and service has been good, when it works. It goes down in the heavy rain, which is often in South Alabama.
I've had some problems with my router not retrieving an IP address. This was eventually fixed by DOWNGRADING the router firmware. My router hasn't had problems in months now.
I've had one TRIA (the TX/RX box on the dish) die recently after an ugly thunderstorm. I called the co-op, and they sent someone out the next day to replace it. That's the only time I've called customer support, and I give them an A+
My pings are 580-650ms on good days, which is about 90-95% of the time. On bad days, I have some packet loss and high pings. Bandwidth has been very close to advertised. I'm supposed to get 512/128, and it's about 500/90 typically. I'm able to play some, but not all, of my games. Most MMORPGs work. I've played SWG, EQ2, WoW, EveOnline, and CoH. I've also played a shooter called WarRock. The shooter lags a bit, but I usually kill more than die. StarCraft won't play, and when it does, I'm booted by the game host for LAG.
Overall, I'm happy. I bought WB with mediocre expectations, and it met and exceeded those.
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EDIT Oct 2006 ---- I've reduced my rating on "connection reliability" from 4 to 2. With clear sky over my house and over Laredo (NOC), I regularly have web browsing time-outs. I have to play tricks with pings just to keep the system alive. IMO, Wildblue has enabled a bandwidth system (it's just my opinion, no fact), that is keeps reducing our bandwidth when we idle for a few seconds. It can take from 2 to 10 seconds for the bandwidth to ramp up. The system is still better than dialup, but you must be prepared to tinker with your system to keep it running good.
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EDIT Nov 21 2006 - WB just forced my modem onto new firmware, which doubled my pings to 1200-1600ms, up from the original 600-800 of the previous 13 months. Gaming is shot to hell. Remote desktop does ok, but is slower. FTP uploads to my website are slower. I've been building a new website, and these modem changes took affect right in the middle. I wish I had finished before hand. I'm downgrading my review. WB sucks, and I will be looking for another ISP (Hughes?) unless things change quickly.
Can you say BAIT-n-SWITCH?
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EDIT Dec 21, 2006 - Prior to today, I've been pleased with tech support and given them 5 points. Now I'm reducing them to 2. For over 52 hours, WB has been down. I had an IP. My modem was locked, and when rebooted would lock again and renew my IP. But I had no communications aside from that. I called tech support four times. The first time they walked me through their troubleshooting script, and then asked me to power everything down and wait 30 MINUTES!!!! 9 hours later I was still down, so I called back. This time they didn't ask me to try anything, they just said there were "weather related" issues. I don't buy it, because tech support could view my modem, and said my stats looked good. They even did a remote reset of the modem. They said it should be better in the morning. It wasn't. I called back two more times, and was told there were issues, with no ETA. They couldn't tell me what was wrong, but said there were very short outages on my beam ranging from 30-60 minutes. But mine was down for 52 hours. They couldn't account for that, and just said I'll have to wait. It came up 10 minutes after my 4th phone call. Odd.....
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EDIT Jan 5, 2008 - Things have been pretty well for the past year, aside from lack of gaming. The modem hasn't crashed, the service has not gone down much. I'm getting close to my "up-to" speeds. Therefore I'm increasing my rating of "Value for money" to 4 and "Connection reliability" to 5. Still not happy about the increased latency, but browsing and downloads are working nicely.
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