Now, mind you, I am not a complainer. I really try to be as level headed and nice about service as possible. I totally understand that customer service is a hard thing and that one person’s experience will vary from place to place and agent to agent, but I believe this rant is totally justified… I can not believe this company! OH MY GOSH…. haha… just thought I would update everyone. We might be online in a week or three more…
********************************************************************
Well… after waiting patiently for the 5 to 7 business days with the holidays and weekends, I finally called Thursday to see the status of our equipment shipment. Of course, they tell me, they haven’t even shipping it and were not intending to because the modem we have had is obsolete and has been for 18 months. Nearly the whole length of our contract and using that dang thing. They didn’t even call or email us to inform us of this, even though they sent us a survey to fill out. I was so livid. And then she tells me that they will send me the next modem up, the one that replaced the old one, for $149 installation charge and a new 2 year agreement. Mind you, I have to install it, from the box. And I have been paying $7 a month for equipment replacement insurance. I told them it was unacceptable. I asked for them to cancel my contract since they were not providing me internet service as we had arranged and I had been paying for it as arranged. And that they have been charging us the top premium cost for obsolute equipment and the slowest speed. They say they can not and that I can end the contract for $200. Unacceptable.
She talks to the supervisor and comes back with they will waive the installation fee, send the newer modem and yet still have the 2 year agreement. Unacceptable. She comes back and says that we are eligible for their new satelitte, Next gen and it will be 10X faster than the old one and more download allowance and just $199 installation and a 2 year contract. I tell her, I would rather be shot in the head than to agree to any longer contract with this company as they are one of the worse I have ever dealt with in regards to service and customer service handling. Unacceptable. My Indian friend is clearly upset, and has been on the phone now for 48 minutes with me. She goes to her supervisor. They counter with waiving the $199 fee, giving us the high speed and oh, yes, she reminds me it’s $20 CHEAPER than our old SLOW service. That just makes me SO MAD I can scream.
The new service is faster, better, more allowance and cheaper??? And they never considered telling us about it? And let us struggle with a discontinued old modem at a premium price? And let us go 2 weeks without and never even thought to contact us??? I tell her, unacceptable.
So finally, she comes back with the supervisor and we talk, and I am so trying to be polite but I am so mad… in the end, guess what? They are sending us the old, retired modem for the last of our contract, 3 months. No extra fee, no extended service contract AND they reduced our fee by $20 a month. We have three months left. I can not wait to be done with this dreadful dreadful company. Think twice before committing to Hughes.net for rural connection.
We are due for this modem in 4 to 5 business days. And yes, they will be crediting us for the total time offline. I know that perhaps the new sat would have been nice, but I just refuse to continue working with them. There are other options we will be considering in the next 90 days.
Pin It
Good for you for sticking to your guns. Yours is not the only review I’ve read about how terrible Hughes is. Talk about horrendous customer service!
But what is your option once your contract with them expires?
You go girl! Gave em hell!!!
I am sooooo proud of you! 😉
My heart races just reading your synopsis of the phone call….having been on sooo many of those calls myself over a 5 year period. Being in your same position we tried T-Mobile 3g hotspot ( good internet service but capped at 5G and hard to stay under that amount), Wild Blue satellite service (never worked as promised and they too offered us repair and upgrade for extended contract and a few hundred dollars – NO THANKS!), Sprint 3g/4g hotspot – great plan – 5g cap on 3g and unlimited on 4g but although I could track our usage of 3g/4g we were billed as if we used all 3g. That required a complaint to the FCC to remedy. Next up and the plan I still use today even though we now live where we have hard wired internet service is AT&T IPhone tethering. Speeds are as good as our hard wired service here and it is great to use while on the road.
Good luck, I have spent many, many hours listening to stupid responses from “customer service” from all of the above companies; paid out tons of money for nothing and had to file complaints with multiple agencies to protect us from the theft these companies engage in regularly.
I did learn that under no circumstance would I ever allow a service provider to have access to my bank account via an automatic EFT as it was as difficult to stop that (little cooperation from our bank) as it was to get them to provide the service we paid for monthly. Wild Blue was able to access an excessive payment by submitting a bill for more than the monthly service amount, effectively bypassing my order to stop their access to monthly payment. Another round of phone calls and visits to our bank to resolve that. Took months!
Be careful and selective and good luck!
You might want to try datajack: http://www.datajack.com. This is a cellular service, and they don’t say through what company,so it would depend on whether or not it would work at your homestead. We used it extensively during our fall trip to Nashville and stayed a several rural campgrounds, where it worked just fine.
It is not as fast as our uverse at home, but it was plenty fine with both our computers hooked up for me to work, for our pictures and so on. Although they don’t say what company provides their bandwidth, most educated gussers say Sprint. I don’t know if that is true, but I do know that we are happy with the pay as you go, no contract aspect of it. We only use it when traveling.
Ask a specials, when we got it, it was only 49.00 for the mifi,and a minimal data plan was included. If you want to see mine I will have it with me next weekend.
Interesting…. do you have to have a phone line though? We don’t at the farm… just cell phones at the moment…
I dislike Hughesnet as well, even though they are my provider. They are literally the only thing I can get besides dial up. This is why I start screaming at the radio when poeple state that rural areas don’t need internet.
I’ve just never dealt with a company that has such dreadful customer service like them before. It’s just awful. I just can not wait to be clear of them.
Nothing to do with a phone line. The device, we use a mifi, pulls signal from a cell network. It is cellular internet. The question would be if it would work at your house.