The white diamond-shaped one is my friend of 17 years -- not an a actual satellite dish, but rather a microwave transceiver. It was installed on the hill above my home in 2001 with a line-of-sight to a Sprint tower many miles away across the San Francisco Bay. Back in 2001 it was the only way to get anything like broadband internet in the rustic canyon in which I live, and it was a pretty good deal. Got about 0.8 mps out of it, download and upload -- and it was an honest 0.8, very consistent. Back when it was installed that was about as good as broadband got, anyway -- though now that's considered slow, and really isn't up to the video content that now dominates the web. Sprint has just had to discontinue the service after all these years, because of a regulatory reallocation of the spectrum that that it uses. So I've had to shop for alternatives.

You can't get DSL up here in the hills. And though Comcast had cabled my canyon a year or so back, when I investigated last year they wanted many thousands of dollars to bring the cable to my house, which is quite a distance off the road. So I asked my telephony provider AT&T what they recommended, and they referred me to a product that they co-brand with Yahoo!, called WildBlue.

So I called WildBlue and signed up. That was the only good part of the experience -- and it turns out to have been what amounts to a fraud. The big gray dish in the picture is the WildBlue dish, after I ripped it off my roof and threw it there on my driveway, on the way to an further dumping in a public dumspster somewhere.

I was promised a free installation. I was promised assistance in getting the WildBlue signal to work with my home network. I was promised download speed of 1.5 mps, and upload speed of 0.25 mps (that is, if I paid a premium price for their highest echelon of service). Every bit of that was a lie.

When the installer came, he announced that my installation was "special" and would require an additional payment of $240 -- a check to be made out to him, not to WildBlue. Once the dish was installed on my roof, the installer screwed the modem in, tested the signal on my laptop (it connected to the web successfully) and announced that he was done. I told him I had been promised that he would configure my home network to work with the new service -- he said he didn't really do that kind of thing, but that he knew how, and would do it as a favor to me. Two hours later, it turned out he didn't have the slightest idea how to do it, and in the process of proving that to me he rendered my home network completely inoperable, even with the Sprint signal. Ultimately I called a tech-savvy friend to come rescue me, and he managed to get it all set to right.

But then it turned out that the advertised speed was not in fact, what the dish was able to deliver. Downloads were typically clocking at about 1.1 mps (1.5 had been promised -- remember, I paid extra for that). Uploads never exceeded even 0.1 mps (I had been promised 0.25). At least on the download side you'd think that I ought to be somewhat satisfied -- after all, it was faster than Sprint had been. But experientially that wasn't true. I don't know why, but even though WildBlue scored better than Sprint on speed tests, the reality of using the two services was that WildBlue was horribly slower. It wasn't much better than dial-up, actually.

So I called tech support at WildBlue. They went through a test with me, got 1.1 mps down and 0.8 up -- and then told me that these speeds were within their "service specifications." I hung up, and immediately started finding an alternative.

I ended up with Comcast. With a year having past, they have changed their installation cost policies, and ended up doing a very complicated cabling from their pole to my house (including 300 feet of trenching, some of which under a road) all for free. The speed is fabulous, and the cost is the same that WildBlue charged.

So with Comcast all up and running, I called WildBlue yesterday to cancel. I was told that I would have to pay all charges so far ($411 for first month and the equipment, plus the $240 the installer pocketed), plus a $650 cancellation fee. I told them that the product was a disappointment in every way, that everything they had promised about it was a lie, and that I wanted a complete refund and no further charges. They told me that the speeds they promised me weren't promised, just indications. And they told me that I have signed a contract committing to these payments (in fact, I have not ever signed anything with them -- another lie).

So here's where it stands. I've notified Visa that my card is being used fraudulently. I'm going to rely on them to straighten this out. If they can't, there'll be a lot more blogging, and maybe a little suing.

Update [6/29/2008]... Reader Rick Hicks contributes,

Thought I could help on a few topics.

1) The installation technicians for all (as far as I know) satellite services are sub-contractors of sub-contractors of... etc., that the 'marketing company' does not know, train, or bear much responsibility for. It is likely that the charge he asked for was his own doing and not with the knowledge or consent of WildBlue.

2) Slowness - while the throughput testing showed equal or higher bandwidth, what they were not showing you in the latency. Satellite communications has much more latency than any other service - usually 1.4 - 1.5 seconds for a response to a transmission. This makes things actually work slower, even though the throughput is better.

In short - satellite is awful service for Internet connectivity.

As for the contract dispute I cannot presume to comment - they are likely being jerks. Just wanted to lend some background to the other issues.

Dude, you so should have called me.

Satellite is universally horrible - I had it when I first moved out here to the boonies for the precise same reason you did. In my case it was phone line up, satellite down, and while it was passable for long downloads, it was terrible for actual work because of the latency. Nothing to be done about that, it's a long way to orbit, and no magic secret sauce will ever fix that.

As for your rejection of the charges. I doubt you will ever get your 240 bucks back from the dude. I had a similar issue when I had mine installed, although in my case I called the sat company and they verified it. In your case I think he was just milking you. I doubt you'll fail when you reject the charge through visa though, because while the company may protest, eventually they'll either get tired or visa will pay them and just stick it in a loss line-item somewhere.

Josh Hendrickson writes,

Paul Krugman has placed himself front and center in the debate as to whether or not oil prices are out of line with fundamentals (he believes the prices do reflect fundamentals). Isn't it therefore time to declare oil prices to be the latest bubble?

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 5:00 PM | link  

There's more...visit the archives!