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Review by MCRoberts 
Posted: 240 days ago
member for 4.1 years, 63 visits, last login: 126 days ago
 Royal Oak,Oakland,MI
 $85 per month
 "Great Support and reliability"
 "A little slow on implementing new features"
| Pre Sales information:
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(ratings match consensus)
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I've had WOW for the past 6 years. It has been VERY reliable - there may have been one or two outages over those 6 years, but no more than that. Speed is as advertised. When I've called for support they have been very helpful; when appointments have been made, they have been kept; when we upgraded to HD a few months ago, the technician configured everything perfectly and took as much time as needed to explain navigation and features.
Very happy and satisfied!
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Review by caldeju
UPDATED: 248 days ago
member for 5.5 years, 20 visits, last login: 224 days ago
Chicago,Cook,IL
$149 per month (month by month)
"Inter net goes down alot"
 "I would not tell anyone to get"
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(ratings well below consensus)
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I have had WOW for over a year here and They can not keep the internet up to speed. They bought a bankrupt cable company hard lines and have not replace or fixed cable, repeaters or old not work amps. Every time any weather wind ( 3.5+ miles per Hour), rain and or snow the system goes down and will stay down till they get fed up with calls they will go and remove couplings on their lines and hope to get thing back up. Do they replace amps, NO they just spray the pots turn them up then down and forget them till next time. I have even set the CEO an email and they did come out but still they did not replace the amps or replace the repeaters that "they say are in bad need to be replaced" but don’t have the money to do such a thing.
If you are also having a problem send email to ceo@wowway.net .
Well here is a update They call this 15mg down 1.5 up loads I dont see that and I have been running Their speed test.
..Speed Test #69018204 by dslreports.com
Run: 2009-03-24 23:20:20 EST
Download: 10270 (Kbps)
Upload: 1084 (Kbps)
In kilobytes per second: 1253.6 down 132.4 up
Tested by server: 12 java
User: 1011262 @ dslreports.com
User's DNS: wideopenwest.com
Compared to the average of 86 tests from wideopenwest.com:
* download is 97% better, upload is 10% better
Followup comments:  MCRoberts
join:2005-09-27
Royal Oak, MI | Rehash Review Do you honestly feel the need to update the same review with the latest speed metrics, just to make sure your review stays on the most recent review list?
We get it. You're getting sucky service. | |
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imrf
Premium
join:2002-06-06
Utica, MI
 ·Comcast
·WOW Internet and C..
| Re: Rehash Review I love how he makes up a story to make WOW look bad. He doesn't even know the history. Or that they would tell him all field gear needs to be replaced desperately. I don't think so. His area was never bought from a bankrupt company, it was owned by SBC. And the WOW e-mail addresses are @wowway.com. | |
| 
WOW customer
@wideopenwest.com
| WOW is great WOW service is great. After being a WOW customer for a few years, they offered to give me a faster internet speed for free. I get the speed they say it is, exactly, no less. The service has gone done due to bad weather occasionally, but only as much as Google mail. Plus, the price of my service is a lot cheaper than other service providers, especially since its bundled with my cable and phone.
P.S. I've never touched the wow mail web client so i can't say anything on that. | |
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Review by JazzJRabbit
UPDATED: 267 days ago
member for 6.1 years, 1263 visits, last login: a few minutes ago
Naperville,Dupage,IL
$75 per month
"Same day install, stable connection, good speeds, good ping"
"Failed DNS lookups redirect to WOW search page"
"Very satisfied"
| Pre Sales information:
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(ratings match consensus)
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To begin with we've been with ATT for the last 8 or so years. It's kind of fun thinking back so far. It certainly has been a long journey. It started as Ameritech, then merged with SBC and then finally came back as ATT. Back then you could still get unbundled DSL from Ameritech and internal PCI DSL cards were still offered as an option with blazing speeds of 768Kbps.
During all that time we've been satisfied with our DSL service. We first had 768Kbps service, which got upgraded to 1.5Mbps and eventually to 3Mbps and then back to 1.5Mbps (more on that later). The quality was mostly good. There were outages, but they were infrequent. Outsourced tech support from India was non-existent, but what can you honestly expect from them? All in all however, we've been satisfied with our service. Stable connection with steady throughput without any slow downs and good pings. What more could you want?
It all began going downhill when we moved to a new location. At our old location we could get reliable service with 3/512 speeds. Those speeds were were not stellar, but lack of bandwidth caps and consistent speeds were more important. At the new location however, we could only get 1.5Mbps. Fine I thought, maybe they will put DSLAM in the area and I will be able to upgrade speeds later. Well, the upgrade never came and in the meantime line quality has been slowly deteriorating with router working only at 1.1Mbps speeds and pings nearly doubling. In the end it got so bad that landline almost stopped working and if it worked it usually killed DSL sync. Kind of like back to dial up days, you can either talk or surf.
So with DSL being almost unusable it was time to switch ISPs. There were two choices, Comcast and WOW. I've been tracking both of them for some time and while WOW traditionally has had slower speeds, it did not appear to have bandwidth caps, unlike comcast, which made my choice.
The sales process was relatively painless and quick. I told the sales person I just wanted 15/2 high speed internet, but he either didn't get me or was just following the script because he still tried to sell me phone and TV services to which I refused. The guy didn't persist and I was able to place an order in about 30-40 minutes.
Installation was scheduled and done on the same day after work hours, very impressive I must say. The installation guy was an independent contractor working for WOW, he looked like ZZ Top kind of guy, massive beard and everything. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I just thought the resemblance was funny. I was also impressed that for someone obviously over 50 he knew ipconfig command and what flash is. One of my acquaintances had Comcast cable installed, they couldn't even get her online, they connected the modem and told her to call customer service. All in all it was refreshing to see someone knowing what he was doing.
The cable was buried within about a week. I was told they'd call me to let me know when it can be done, but they never did. Not really a problem, but I wish they'd let me know.
Installation was half off and only cost $20. The monthly bill is 72.99 + 2.50 for modem rental which comes out to 75.49. No taxes or surcharges of any kind. Very nice to see that you pay exactly what you get quoted. Of course this might not be the case if you get phone and/or TV from WOW, but at least for internet "what you see is what you pay".
After having WOW for about week and a half I can say I'm very satisfied with it. 1.5Mbps DSL was simply too slow to be used by entire household. There simply wasn't enough bandwidth to apply patches and watch youtube at the same time, and if someone was watching youtube it meant game pings would go from normal 110ms to 170-350ms. This is no longer a problem with WOW. The speed test shows 15/2 just like advertised. I think there is some fluctuation because I tested several times over several days and there were couple of times when the speed test came back as 10/1.5. Still this is over 10 times what I realistically had with ATT so I cannot complain. Most importantly I see no significant slow down when multiple people use internet, whenever someone watches youtube or applies patches, or downloads something. The pings to my favorite server are half of what I had with ATT or about 48-53ms. They are very stable and I can download at about 300kb/s and see no difference in ping times. I need to download at 600kb/s to see the ping go up by a couple of milliseconds. There are times when I see my pings spike, but they are very infrequent and this may not even be WOW fault, it may be someone else in the house downloading or just a congestion somewhere on the path to the server. Even remoting in to work from home is a much more pleasant experience. With ATT I was struggling because there was almost a second delay an any action, with WOW it's much more responsive.
Just about the only negative I can say about WOW is that they redirect failed DNS lookups to their own search page. This is extremely annoying if you make "off by one letter" error when typing an address. Without redirection I can just press CTRL+L in firefox, correct the mistake and be on my way. With DNS redirection I get wowway.search.blahblahblah (or whatever) in address bar so I have to retype entire address again.
I realize this is a very glowing review and that individual experiences depend on a lot of factors. Some people have bad experiences with Cable and get better service with DSL, some, have bad DSL service and have good experience with cable. With WOW it would seem most of the complaints are coming from MI, IN, and OH, whereas IL is relatively trouble free. But then of course, it's very individual and there is no way to say if you will have good service or not. In my case we've had good DSL service before moving and very poor after the move with abysmal speeds and horrible line quality. WOW on the other hand provided a wonderful experience so far.
So to recap:
PRO
-Same day install
-The speed may vary, but I haven't seen it below 10Mbps
-So far no outages (only had the service for 10 or so days though)
-What you see is what you pay (at least if you order Internet only without phone/cable)
-Good pings
-No bandwidth caps that I know of
CONS
-WOW redirects failed DNS lookups to its own search page
NEUTRAL
-Wish they'd call to let me know when they were going to bury the cable.
-Sales person tried to sell me more services, but did not insist when I told him no
UPDATE 03/06/09
I learned that WOW was in cahoots with behavioral advertising agencies such as NebuAd and is still in cahoots with RIAA/MPAA. Doesn't affect me directly, but leaves a poor impression.
Also, connection stability has been going downhill lately. I've been getting lag spikes when gaming in the last month, I would lag for about 5 seconds and then go back to usual. Would have been no biggie, but in the last two days I completely lost my connection three times. I had to unplug my cable modem each time to get my connection back.
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Review by untypoed
Posted: 278 days ago
member for 278 days, 3 visits, last login: 95 days ago
Columbus,Franklin,OH
Contract price not specified.
"Fast internet, never down, always up, great channels on tv that doesn't require digital box for, don't need to switch for dtv.."
"When I search "WOW internet" I keep finding "World of Warcraft".. haha. Also, WOW! is sometimes slow."
"Great for your money. Fast internet. You'll love it."
| Pre Sales information:
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Before, I've used Time Warner Internet. We had some problems with Time Warner internet. It wasn't all bad. We never really had any problems until we moved. But, what really made us switch is the pricing. We also had some problems with that. They sometimes charged us a little extra for some reason, and we just got aggravvated so we switched to WOW internet.
The only bad thing about WOW really is.. when I search "Wow internet", I find "World of Warcraft" so you could understand why it took a while to find it. Lol, haha. Whatever. Anyways, I really enjoy the internet. Fast speed. Never, ever, ever, goes down. When everyone else is down, we're up. WOW! internet has that magical thing about it. Also, we don't have to do anything to switch to the DTV thing that was delayed.
Also, another thing I enjoyed is the channels. I don't have to have that digital box to get Nicktoons and Disney XD which was formerly Toon Disney.
To sum up this review, WOW! internet will save money. Use the extra money to buy a cheap computer or something. WOW! internet is just.. wonderful.
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 Review by Samus82
UPDATED: 297 days ago
member for 7.8 years, 3401 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Chicago,Cook,IL
$120 per month
 about 2 days
"Price?"
"On Demand a Joke (did i say that loud enough?)"
"Cheaper then Comcast yet some tradeoffs. (cant wait for Uverse..coming soon)"
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The on demand is a complete joke. No content at all unless you pay for it. The equipment i have is also a bit buggy. The cable box needs to be reset every once in a while or you get this weird buzzing sound.
On a good note. I think the network was recently upgraded because my internet went out for about 1 night and when it came back i now have 8meg download speed. I pay for 6 meg, and i always got about 3 meg tops. Must have fixed something.
The price is ok i pay about $120 for some HD channels, Starz, Encore, and 8 meg internet.
UPDATE!!
______________________
Not only do i get charged for the 8 meg internet now, i only really get 6 meg. Nice huh? Price of my bill has gone up. This is the last straw untill Uverse hits my block. OR untill Comcast can offer something better for cheaper.
Followup comments: dmcglone01
join:2006-03-14
Eastpointe, MI | WOW If you have to reset your box offen because of a bzzing noice, contact WOW and have them replace the cable box! | |
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 Review by CCat
UPDATED: 302 days ago
member for 3.9 years, 2237 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Berea,Cuyahoga,OH
$57 per month
about 5 days
"Fairly consistent, support OK"
"Falling behind with speed increases."
"Still good but competition is overtaking them."
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Initially ordered 4000/500 at $49/mo. Increased this to the Ultra 6000/500 for $59. (WOW later increased this to 6000/650 for rented modems) Dynamic IP. The install was good, took about 5 days from order to install.
When I first got WOW it was great. Fast speeds consistently. As time went on it seemed that they just added more customers but did nothing to improve their system. Now they are no better or no worse than their competition. If they do not start increasing their service I believe they will start loosing their customers. As far as their support it remains the same, pretty good. The price could be better but its still competitive. So far nothing else has a lot more to offer, so I will stick with them for the time being.
5/3/06 - For the last few months Ive only been averaging 2.5mb - 3.0mb for download speed everything checks out OK (inside). WOW says it doesn't have any problems on their end. Have to set up an appointment with a specialist to have my setup checked. Hope this gets resolved its driving me crazy.
11/3/06 - Resolved the issue with my speed. Seems it was my anti-virus resident scanner. I uninstalled that AV and installed a different one. Now my speeds are 6300-6500 down and 650 up. Would still like to see WOW get their ultra package to 10/2, but I guess that wont happen for a while.
5/6/07 - Nothing has changed since the last time. One thing I will say is that I have not had an outage or a single issue with the service. I guess that's a plus considering some problems others have had with different ISP's.
12/15/07 - Speeds are about the same (as advertised) 6300-6500 down and 650 up. No issues or outages, so in that respect they are doing good. The competition has upped their speed to 15000/768 for their turbo tier. Will have to do some checking on that, but for now all is good.
Mar 2008 - Switched to Roadrunner. They came up with a much better offer.
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Review by JackSparrow
UPDATED: 305 days ago
member for 5.9 years, 743 visits, last login: 24 days ago
Troy,Oakland,MI
$100 per month (18 month contract)
about 8 days
"Awesome price, great support, much better than Comcast."
"Need more HD channels"
"Great ISP with some minor problems"
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I am pleased that WOW recently added higher speeds, and I currently have the 15/1 package which is great.
Overall my plan is costing me about $100 a month for Xtreme Internet Tier+Digital Basic Cable+Digital Variety Pack+HD-DVR+HD Pak.
The speeds hold constant, and the support is great. There are random issues here and there, but that is the same with all ISPs.
They have recently added a few more HD channels which is nice, but once again, they are still lagging behind a bit.
Overall, I am happy with WOW and I'd recommend it any day to family and friends over competing ISPs, mainly due to their excellent prices and great support.
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 Review by skyhook
UPDATED: 316 days ago
member for 5.4 years, 1667 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Columbus,Franklin,OH
$67 per month
about 6 days
"They answer the phone."
"Very rude support people."
"Stay away if you require a reliable internet connection."
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I've been with WoW since they bought the assets of Americast. They used to offer more and better service for the money spent but sadly that is no longer the case. You rarely get the internet speed you are paying for and network congestion is always a big problem. Not a good thing if you play online games.
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01-16-2009
I canceled the service. They couldn't (or wouldn't) provide on internet connection that supports real time protocols like VOIP or video streaming. Jitter and lost packets made voice communications impossible about half the time.
Maybe WOW can work through these problem in time, but avoid them until they do.
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Review by rhoniss
UPDATED: 320 days ago
member for 2 years, 47 visits, last login: 190 days ago
Canton,Wayne,MI
$120 per month
about 4 days
"Top notch quality, prompt installation, nice equipment"
"Need more HD channels"
"WOW continues to be the best"
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We've had WOW digital cable and internet since they rolled out service in Canton. Now it was time to upgrade to HD service. I called WOW on Monday and they scheduled me for Friday between 5 and 7pm. I could have had the installation earlier in the week, but I could not miss work. The tech was at my house 5 minutes before 5pm. Within 25 minutes he had hooked up my new HD DVR and moved my current digital box to another TV. He walked me through all of the new settings and controls on the DVR and also setup the remotes to control the TV, HD receiver, etc.
The net result of this change was a decrease in my bill for $5. I love the new bundles. We get HD (with a DVR), digital service (1 set-top box), 8Mbps internet, and the Showtime group for $120/month.
The picture quality on HD is tremendous. We just purchased a 42" LCD 1080p monitor and I can't believe I was watching standard def TV for so many years.
WOW continues to be the best in the area for customer service, value, and quality. Here's hoping they can increase the number of HD channels available in the very near future.
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Review by cavemanf16
Posted: 324 days ago
member for 8.7 years, 62 visits, last login: 265 days ago
Galloway,Franklin,OH
$80 per month (12 month contract)
about 4 days
"No slow-downs in the evening like TW, consistent performance"
"HD cable signal overlaps analog cable, and causes ugly HD picture"
"Very good service for the price, but you will be disappointed with HD cable channels"
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Tried Time Warner Cable for a month, and speeds dropped to near unusable levels every day at 4:30pm - 8:30pm because everyone else in our neighborhood was online then. TW was also filtering a church's website (because it had a lot of video content, maybe??) but continually denied filtering any websites, even though I could prove that they were intentionally sending back the packets to drop the connection when I packet traced my connection to that website.
WOW matched TW's price to entice us back (for 1yr), and I haven't looked back. MUCH easier to setup my own cable modem/router with WOW than TW, customer service is great, and tech support isn't terrible (not great, but not close to as bad as TW). Speed is always consistently high.
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WOW
Go get another ISP.
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