Review by bobmepp 
member for 350 days, 2 visits, last login: 281 days ago
updated 281 days ago
 Hastings,Barry,MI
 Contract price not specified.  "Speeds so far are very fast" "The pings are there but not as slow as I expected" "Great service for my rural area where there are no alternatives"
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Value for money:
(ratings well above consensus)
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I had been suffering for two years with deteriorating mobile "broadband" hotspot service via a Sprint smart phone. Speeds were dropping, often to no better than dialup, and the straw that broke the camel's back was a newly imposed hot spot data limit of 5 gigs per month, when we had been averaging 8 gigs per month. Overages were to cost $50 per gig. Not workable, do I dumped it.
About the same time, I received a mailer for the new exede satellite being offered by Wild Blue. I guess the new name of the company is exede, although my dish has "Wild Blue" on it. I ordered the 25 gig per month service at $130 because I need some capacity overhead for my photo editing and web design businesses. I called a Wild Blue dealer in Battle Creek, Michigan, and arranged installation through them. This whole process went very smoothly, with the installer arriving on schedule and spending about a half hour with me discussing alternatives for the dish location, and doing a good job of explaining maximum wire runs allowable, etc. He really knew his stuff, and did an excellent install, with a proper ground connection and careful wire routing in the house. I absolutely cannot fault the install process in any way. It was a nice clear day, so he got full signal strength promptly, he demonstrated the connection speed with some HD video, and he was on his way.
Over the past three weeks I have been averaging 6 to 8 mbps down and 1.5 to 3 mbps up. Very little speed differences during prime time hours. Peak speeds have measured over 12 mbps. I did a download of a 150 meg video card driver in less than 5 minutes. Have done a download of a full album from Itunes and just a few minutes. Pings, as expected, have been about 850ms. These hurt script laden page loads where there are multiple calls back to the server during the load. Still, most web pages are there in 5 seconds or less. There have been two brief outages. I called the support line during one, and the person who answered spent 20 minutes with me, providing very useful information when I told him I was a new customer. The second outage was weather related, and was over in about 1/2 hour. I really can't fault anything about this service. If they don't overload the beam with too many users, this promises to be a great solution for me.
Update 9-9-2012: Things are continuing to go very well. I haven't calculated precisely, but my uptime has been excellent. Total outage time so far due to weather: about 6 hours in 60 days. No single outage has been more than 2 hours. Speeds are continuing to average 6 to 8 mbps down and 1 to 2 mbps up. I've measured a peak download speed of 13 mbps. I'm having the heaviest month of usage so far, but still have not used half of my 25 gigs, and this after downloading most of the large adobe apps. I am not foolish enough to think that streaming movies is a viable plan with satellite internet. Overall, I would give the same scores as my initial review.
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