Review by MaryW  - Location: Washington Boro,Lancaster,PA
- Cost Contract price not specified.
Good "Surprisingly good connections and up time"
Bad "Rough start"
Overall "Budget plenty of aggravation for a rough start up then expect smooth service"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Mail,DNS,News:
Value for money:
(ratings above consensus)
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First, thanks to the DSLReports community for their input on Exede satellite internet. Bottom line is that after a rocky installation in late July it has been humming.
Our house (built 2005) is located in semi-rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; south of Harrisburg and north of Baltimore. We used to get strong 4G service from AT&T and used an air card until last Christmas when AT&T reconfigured the towers and now we’re out of line of sight and can barely scrape together two bars of service. Comcast cable stops one mile down the street. We’ve always had DirecTV with excellent service.
The Exede order process went smoothly. The installer arrived and took his time chosing a site on our roof, which wound up being right next to our DirecTV dish. He said the site was about perfect - no trees, clear shot of sky. The install took four hours. The modem is located in the second floor office, physically about 12' from the dish outside.
After reading DSLReports I wasn’t surprised when the modem cut out after 12 hours of service. The Customer Support person was excellent, took me through the rebooting and pinged the line (I guess) and said ‘Yup, we need to come back out’. Unfortunately whatever she saw was not relayed to the next technician who came out and said ‘It’s all working fine’ - which it was at that moment but service would only stay up for 2-3 hours at a time. He left me a new modem.
The next day everything failed and would not reset, so we had a third service call and the technician stayed for 2.5 hours. This time I insisted Customer Support give him a full report of what they saw (which is not what he could see). He said the initial install did not tighten things down enough plus some other things.
We are now on day 40 of the install, with the only service outages being very brief storm related outages and that weird east coast outage after the huge glitch on Wall Street. Response times are very fast, we are currently in the middle of a storm and speedtest.net says 7.9 down 3.21 up. Normally we're at around 12/3.5. We are running a nice wifi via an Asus router and as long as we stay off streaming 15GB has been fine. I did a test at the end of our first service period when we had 3GB left and streamed a Netflix movie for exactly 60 minutes - it ate 0.8GB. Same test with Pandora was 0.3GB.
I have not tried the late night free downloading yet.
What could be better? More GB for less money, and Customer Service could have better coordination with the field techs.
Bottom line: Exede and Wildblue seem to have their act together on this, and while installation can be rocky stick to your guns and get it right.
member for 69 days, 4 visits, last login: 6 days ago
lodged 20 days ago
Comments:
 | | Unbelieveable lousy service I'm having terrible problems with the service. I checked my usage. It was 6.5 left. I immediately turned off my router because of high meter readings. I turned it back on 4 and 1/2 hours later and immediately checked my meter. I had used .6 gigs while everything was turned off. NO problems the first 5 months, but the last several months has been a nightmare. I would never recommend Wildblue. | |
|  | MaryW
join:2013-07-28
Washington Boro, PA Reviews:
 ·WildBlue
| Re: Unbelieveable lousy service I've been noticing some unusually varied meter readings myself so I've installed Satellite Restriction Tracker (realityripple.com - he also has an open blog on wildblueworld.com) to get a more detailed picture of my usage. The Exede meter is a joke and SRT is robust. At first glance there seems to be incorrect accounting on the 'free' time each night. | |
| | | | | Re: Unbelieveable lousy service Thank you for your response. I would appreciate it if you could let me know what you find out and what you are doing. | |
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| | | Hello upset,
I'm sorry to hear about the data accumulation concerns. I'll be more than happy to take a look and see what I can do to help!
One thought that came to me when reading your post is that when you shut the modem off, the last 15+ min of data activity used gets stored there in the modem and will not transmit to the usage meter until you re-connect the modem. That is likely why you saw .6Gb jump quickly upon re-connection.
For help with your questions or concerns feel free to shoot me an email with your account or phone number, a brief description of the issue (copy the post from here), and the best time to reach you. My email address is: exedelistens@viasat.com.
Thanks  | |
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Reviews:
·WildBlue
| Wildblue Used to be acceptable while the recovery act was on I am under the recovery wildblue basic. The service used to be acceptably slow. It has always been slow. Always less than 1Mps, but usable. Even if I went over the monthly limit I could still stream pandora at least which kept me happy. But as soon as the recovery act was over, wildblue is no longer usable whatsoever if you exceed your limit by even a small amount.
To me this is almost a fraud. They took the governments money for recovery. Promised to sustain the service afterwards but make the service so unusable that you're forced to upgrade to another plan. I'll tell you what wildblue. I'm going to cellular MIFI, You've lost a good customer. | |
| | | | Re: Wildblue Used to be acceptable while the recovery act was on blues4wildbl,
I'm sorry to hear you feel that way! We certainly do value your business and don't want to lose you. I will be happy to take a look at your account and see if there are any options I can offer to help bring a higher level of satisfaction.
Please e-mail me at exedelistens@viasat.com with your account/phone number and a copy of your post, and the best time to get a hold of you by phone.
Take care! | |
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Reviews:
·WildBlue
| I had a rough start too The rough start was due to the person taking the order giving me an install date and apparently didn't enter it in their system because come install day no one showed up. When we did finally get it arranged the tech rushed through and was done in an hour. He wasn't even going to wait for me to test it on my own laptop, and wouldn't put the modem where we wanted it. It's in a utility closet, so good thing we didn't need a wired computer. On the plus side, we never had a problem with the service other than a couple outages during heavy rain. We checked the usage every day and it seemed appropriate. We did not use it during the free time. Seems a lot of people have trouble with that. | |
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