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I moved into a new home in July 2013. Cable and DSL were not available so after some research I came upon Internet America (what I will now refer to as IA) . I called IA and inquired about the service and I specifically asked "is there a contract?" I was told "no". I clearly reiterated "so it is just month-to-month then?" I was told "yes". Keep this in mind... I agreed to order the service and scheduled an install date which was about 2 weeks wait. I am in the military and was not able to be home during the install as I was out of state for an exercise, so my wife took a day off from work to be there. The install presumably went fine. When it worked, it wasn't bad and for the most part, I felt I was getting most of the bandwidth I was paying for. Over the course of several months however, it had a sporadic reliability rate. It would quit regularly anywhere from seconds to almost a day. Calls to support ranged from non-existent (recording saying we're too busy we'll call you back) to perfectly incompetent: "sir, traceroute is not an authorized program to use on our network!" WHAT!?!?! And still this "tech" who didn't even understand what traceroute is, still insisted that I didn't know how to reset a router or reboot my computer and I should therefore do it, over and over and over... *sigh* Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Eventually, it went down and never came back up. So a tech came out. After 5 HOURS in my house, this guy got it working again and came to the conclusion that most of the problems I'd been having were because the original IA installer had improperly "double grounded" the equipment, etc. Whatever. For the next couple of months, reliability was much improved, but still experienced frequent albeit shorter outages. Then fiber access came to my neighborhood. As soon as it was installed I called IA and told them to terminate my service. After answering their question "why?" I was told "you understand there will be a $200 early termination fee?" Oh? After protesting, I wanted to see a copy of the contract I had signed. I got one in email... with my wife's signature. Now here's the deal: find on IA's site where it says there is a 24-month contract required for their wireless internet packages. It isn't there. If it is, I can't find it. In their TOS it says: "Wireless Internet customers terminating service prior to the end of the contract term or if company terminates customer's Service due to customer's default or violation of Terms of Service, customer agrees to pay company a Two Hundred Dollar ($200.00) early termination fee in addition to all other amounts owed." That is well and good, except that they tell you there is no contract term when you order the service on the phone, and only after some dummy crawls around on your roof for a couple of hours does one get easy access to the aforementioned contract! I wish I would have been home when that contract was handed out. I would have told the guy to go stuff himself. My wife didn't know what I'd agreed to. IA is a shady, crap company, and their service sucks. member for 9.9 years, driveby review (so far) updated 9.9 years ago
So first I kept taking off work to meet with their installer. They didn't call within the allotted time of 10am to 4pm to let me know he was't coming. Then when they did finally send someone out a couple weeks after my first appointment the install had this long wire stretched out into my office room and a hideous ribbed antenna sticking out about eye level. Not only that but the service was aweful. extremely high pings, speed tests from 0.1Mbps to 1.2 Mbps (I was paying for 4mbps) So I got them to send someone else out, he put up a nice dish looking antenna and even though I'm only about a mile from the antenna he had a hard time locking in a signal. He kept with it though and got it all set up. Ping was low around 40ms and speeds were 3.5Mbps. He also installed a wall plate. I was much happier. After 6 months of having them I am very displeased. I call it shiternet. I've had so many on going problems every month. Their website always says no problems detected but if you call tech they frequently have messages about the areas experiencing issues. Frequently my area. The ping is so drastic. Sometimes ill have a nice low 30ms ping, other times it can be 200, 300 even as high as 800ms! The last 30 days Ive had at least 5 days of no internet at all. Another issue I've had especially lately is the internet shuts off for about 1 minute after working for 20 minutes. If you email tech support you can expect a reply in about a month. I was having pings close to a 1000ms for about a week, and I emailed them and a month later they said, yeah we saw you had high pings but it looks like it's better now. What the heck!?!? My speeds vary wildly. A good day I get right at 4 megs a typical day is about 2 and a bad day is like 0.3. One day I had no internet at all, I checked the gateway in my router and instead of the typical 66.XXX.XXX.XXX IP it was something like 192.168.1.18. Someone elses router was plugged in wrong trying to provide me and who knows who else with internet! Apparently whoever did the install forgot to check whatever box needed to be checked to prevent that. I managed to log in to the individuals router and disable DHCP which fixed it. But when I spoke to internet america about it prior, explaining what was obviously happening they said they would have to wait a few days to see if that person called in with no internet! This is not a home network, this is supposed to be a professional internet provider. Anyways the flaky service and constant outages is enraging. What is even more enraging is there is a dsl provider within range of my house, but they are prohibited to sell me service because Verizon owns the territorial rights and chooses not to install a DSL hub!! What a waste! member for 11.2 years, driveby review (so far) lodged 11.2 years ago
i have had this service for 5 years, its the only service i can get. i have the 512k/256. i have had the top service also. speeds are 1.00down to .200 poor most of the time. have had them out but no better service, but its all i can get. member for 16.9 years, 19 visits, last login: 12.1 years ago lodged 13.3 years ago
I used to have WiMAX service through Blue Wireless & Data until they were bought out by Internet America back in 2008. The number of outages I experienced after IA took over increased dramatically, especially in early 2009. They had a switch (or something) that kept dropping and it took them months to repair or replace it. Since then, I've had very few outages, but my speed isn't great. I pay for their Silver plan, which is 1024 Kbps down / 384 Kbps up, but the only time I can get that speed is late at night or early morning. I had been paying $41.18 per month for the Silver plan, but they raised it to $52.05 (all fees included) beginning in March of 2010. I am using a Motorola Canopy antenna which IA provides. member for 18.9 years, 52 visits, last login: 5.3 years ago lodged 14.1 years ago
UPDATE (Feb 17, 2007) Service is currently unacceptable for the cost, I'm going back to satellite. Over the past 4-5 months throughput is typically less than 19kb/sec and is currently less than 2kbp/sec (Dial-Up Speed). It also goes down quite often. While they may be able to claim 95% uptime, if it goes down for 30 seconds every hour, that's enough for it to kill a corporate VPN connection or any other active connection type of service. UPDATED (June 5, 2007): Load must be increasing or something, typical download speeds have been in the 45k/sec area for at least the past couple of months. UPDATED (Feb 15, 2007): I ordered the only package available, it's $50/month + around $200 for the install/equipment. The installer who came out was unable to get the service running after two hours or so. When he called in to the office to get assistance, they told him to stop trying to get it to work and to move on to his next appointment. So they left without it working on the first shot. The installer basically said I would have to call in and open a ticket. The company advertises speeds "up-to" cable standards and while the system may technically be capable of that throughput, the reality for users is more like 1/3 to 1/2 of similarly priced cable packages, depending on the time of day. But this is really a moot point since cable isn't available in my area, more of a commentary on their advertising. I initially had a problem attaining download speeds over 9k/sec. When I called tech support for help with my seemingly slow connection, they told me the connection between my radio and the tower was fine, that I should just wait a couple days and it would get faster. Well six months later, it wasn't faster. I called tech support again recently and they were able to increase the bandwidth of my service to an acceptable level (90-100k/sec down). Apparently my account had been restricted due to excessive uploading, the tech suggested a virus or spy ware. I'm not sure why the initial tech didn't notice the account had a restriction, or why I wasn't notified that my account had been restricted in the first place. Service is much better now, still not what I was used to with cable service (350-600k/sec down) but much, much better. I have switched to using this service as my primary connection over satellite because even thought the download speed is about half of satellite (granted, the sat connection is nearly twice the price), the latency advantage more than makes up for it when doing standard web browsing. If the bandwidth speed remains the same or improves, I'll be able to cancel my Satellite connection and just use this. member for 17.9 years, 8 visits, last login: 15.3 years ago updated 16.1 years ago
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