pilot_in_fla
join:2008-04-29
 ·StarBand Communica..
| reply to bajadudes
Re: Starband -- premium price, deteriorating service
I do appreciate your responses. My recollection is that I had been told about the other Starband service options about 1 1/2 years ago. I had to replace my 360 modem (at a cost of $99) at that time so I would have been receptive to an upgrade if that had not come at a higher monthly cost. Perhaps I was only told about higher cost options, I really don't know. I do know that the service had already been deteriorating but it was still at least minimally acceptable.
While the deliberate degradation of my service (you call FAP) was the last straw as far as I was concerned, the service had been deteriorating for some time. The technical support folks were unable to explain why my usage (mostly basic web browsing and email with no large file transfers) would trigger the service degradation and they were unwilling to provide any suggestions as to how I might monitor my usage in real time. I did read a report elsewhere on this site by a Starband user who discovered that the usage data attributed to him was not correct -- I suspect that was also happening to me but no one at Starband seemed to care.
Up until the beginning of this year, I was able to run my desktop machine and a laptop linked through a wireless router on the Starband connection with at least minimally acceptable performance. Since then, the performance of the laptop became so bad that running it on a dialup became the only acceptable option. Over the last couple of months, the performance on the desktop deteriorated quite a bit as well. At the end, Starband was so bad that alternating use of the dial-up between the two computers became the only option. Perhaps whatever "node" I was assigned to was severely overloaded -- I really have no way of knowing.
Perhaps an option of one day on the satellite and one day on the dialup might work but paying $70 a month for that kind of service makes no sense.
My account was paid up through today but I pulled the equipment yesterday. When I tried to check my account today, I found it had already been disabled -- a bit of adding insult to injury. |
