A friend of mine ordered internet service from Wild Blue Communications. When she was placing the order she had to pay a $5.00 processing fee, she gave them her debit card number but was told the for some reason the card was denied. I offered her to use my card for the processing fee. About a week later the installer finally showed up and spent nearly all day installing the equipment and then left. Later that day the Internet service went down and no longer worked, she contacted Wild Blue and was told by a Wild Blue Technical Support person that they would send a technician out to check the service but it would be a $100.00 service charge. She told them she was not going to pay the charge because the service never worked. Afet haggling with Wild Blue for two daysabout this issue, she told them she wanted to cancel the service. The Wild Blue rep told her they would charge her for breach of contract, at this point she say she didn't give a **** what they did. On or about Feb 20, 2009 Wild Blue charge MY DEBIT CARD forthe amount of 534.21. I contacted Wild Blue and informed them that I did not order their service nor authorize them to debit my account for this amount. I was basically given the runaround for 3 days before finally being told by a supervisor in the billing dept that since Wild Blue had no record of me having a account with them, that thee 534.21 would be credited back to debit account within 3-5 days. On March 3, 2009 I was called by a Wild Blue rep stating that I wouyld need to send them a police report that my card had been stolen in order for them to refund my money. I informed the rep that my card was not stolen, that they had took the liberty to debit my account for my friends bill. I guess since I allowed them to debit my account for a $5.00 processing fee on my friends behalf that they automatically assumed I would pay the whole thing. I have turned this over to an attorney as Wild Blue has no interest in resolving this matter on the own.

These guys are terrible. Their service is slow, the upload times never reach top quoted speeds, and the download speeds rarely reach top quoted speeds. The service goes out, or has blips of down time routinely. Also, when you try and cancel, I think it must be one of their corporate directives to try and screw people over and over-charge them for extra months. My contract went from May through April, that was my 12-month contract. Then, I needed to cancel in March, so I fully expected to be charged through April. I had already paid for March, and expected my final month to be for $49.95, the one final month of my contract. NOPE! They charged me $162!!! They tried to say my contract went through June. They are total shisters. I spoke with a cust service rep when cancelling, and she said "I spoke with my manager, and we will charge you just for your final month of April - $49.95". I took down the ticket number of the call, and forwarded it to them when I got my final invoice, and no reply at all! I replied to my final invoice, and no reply at all! If anyone knows the email addresses of their corporate people, please send it to me at [email protected]. I want to fry these guys for trying to steal money from me, and then ignoring me entirely and lying to me. DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THESE PEOPLE!!

Wild Blue Trouble from Day one.

The free install wasn't free at all, the person that installed the service charged an extra $200 to set a $40 pipe in the ground with a $5 sack of concrete. If i had known that this was needed ahead of time I could have easily done it myself. But this was only the start of my problems, the service never seemed to work better than a dial up modem for my first 8 months of service. They always blamed the weather, or some other nonsense. They would not send out a technician to check the problem because everything looked fine on their end. Finally after months of complaining they decide to send a technician out, we set a date and time for the appointment over the phone. I take a day off of work and nobody shows, no phone call, no e-mail, no nothing. This happens 3 times before I had enough and got a hold of their contractor directly to setup the appointment with them personally. Finally manage to get together with the contractor and turns out the dish was misaligned from day 1.

Service actually worked half way decent for awhile after that, but then a new problem popped up, the modem would disconnect for no good reason 5-10 times a day. After 90 days of calling and complaining about it to no avail all of a sudden i try to logon one day and it says my modem isn't registered! Calling their clueless tech support back I spend 3 hours trying to get the modem back up and going to no avail, I get passed up the tech support chain until someone finally gives me a username / password combo that works and gets my modem registered and back online. The same old problem still persists and i had all but given up on this sorry excuse for a company and accepted my doomed fate of crappy speeds and random disconnects.

So i get my first FAP violation, I did not know this at the time, and evidently neither does the company! I call up complaining of slow speeds, they can not figure out why. So they setup for one of their lovely technicians to come out (sarcasm) to check the issue. Setup a appointment for in 3 weeks, done deal... not! I call them back to check on the status of my ticket hoping something could be done on their end to save a technician coming out. Turns out I had a FAP violation on the account. They are supposed to send out an email when you are at 80% of your threshold on your bandwidth allotment before they slow your speed down. I got the email well after they turned it down. I asked to cancel the technician because obviously i don't need my equipment swaped out if its just a FAP violation. So 2 weeks AFTER the appointment date the technician calls and wants to know how to find the house to change out my equipment! Wildblue didn't tell them to cancel the ticket evidently, another sign of their fine communication capabilities. So surfing on terrible speeds one night my modem just goes offline and then 30 minutes later I get a call from wildblue letting me know that they are gona cut my connection. Gee thanks, already done my friend! Just so happened I was in the middle of some important work online... so much for that! Turns out the reason for this is my modems registration numbers had been switched with another person with the same name out of Texas, but in their own computer system. Every time he had trouble and called it in, it would cause our modem to go offline and vice versa. I believe this is still the case with my connection to this day. I tried calling them back on this issue and now they have no memory it ever happened. Communication is not something Wild Blue is good at, nobody knows what is going on with their accounts, not even the supervisors have a clue at this company. That FAP violation most likely had something to do with our 2 accounts being crossed, i'll never know and I'm certain neither will this company. One thing is for sure, they take that money out of my account every month but heaven forbid I actually get what I pay for.