The good: their actual fiber internet service is excellent. Once we had my circuit's capacity dialed in, it consistently met or exceeded the provisioned line-rate. Their technical support is sublime: I needed to open a ticket about an inconsistency I was seeing in the connection. This was resolved in 3 days and I received a personal call from their NOC manager afterwards to verify everything was fixed. It was representative of everything I love about working with small, local ISPs. Why the overall negative review? The sales/billing department. tl;dr - we agreed on one price, and they unapologetically charged me another. Relevant background: Professionally, I have dealt with every shady network provider on both coasts, and been through the ringer with each of them (Level 3, Comcast, MegaPath, HughesNet - etc). Due to this, I keep detailed notes of every call I have with a network provider, from the initial "Hey I'd like to provision this line", onwards. This includes number called, person spoke with, what was talked about, what conclusions were reached and why, etc. This pattern continued with Access Montana. Their website states "straight forward pricing with no gimmicks...", but there is not a single price listed anywhere. All of their services involve a call or webform to receive an individual quote per customer. As I intended to run several servers for my business on this connection, I was referred to the 'business department' several times throughout the provisioning process, being told variations of "we can negotiate you a special business rate for your connection". So far, so good. We initially started with a 500mbit connection for $299/mo, with a block of 5 static IPs for $5/mo/ea - $324/mo total. After several weeks of monitoring, it was clear the line was struggling to meet that throughput. I reached out to Access Montana, and we discovered that particular circuit could not support that level of service. We could do a private connection for $1500/mo, or we could price out a slower but more stable connection. As this 'business connection' was initially a negotiation, I tried negotiating: what happens to pricing when we make the line symmetric, a better price for the IPs, or a better Service Level Agreement, etc etc. This didn't seem to sit well with my contact in the 'business billing department', but we came to an agreement that seemed fair. As I was paying $299/mo for 500mbit, but the line can be provisioned at 250mbit for half that cost - $150. The IPs would remain at $5/mo/ea, so $175/mo total. "$175 All inclusive" is the phrase in my notes. Fast forward, and I receive a bill for $199. I email my contact, and we begin a back-and-forth discussion. I have my notes, the agent claims she has hers, and they differ. Requests for documentation are ignored, and my last request to please go back to the customer service recording was also ignored. I tried escalating to a general manager over a week ago, and that was also ignored. Their conduct, in my opinion, has been petty and unprofessional. They have been unable (or unwilling) to produce standard customer service records around this matter, and I am absolutely not going to do business with a company that promises one price for something and charges another. What does this mean for the average consumer who wants a fast internet connection? I wouldn't do business with this company if there was any other alternative. Fortunately, Starlink has prioritized Lake County, Montana for connectivity due to the Reservation and its rural status. It is easy to sign up with them, they have a public price list, and their download is comparable to Access Montana's 250mbit line speed. Starlink's upload could be better, but that improves every quarter as more satellites are added to the constellation. If you don't have any other choice for internet connectivity, proceed with extreme caution. Demand emailed documentation - don't "wait for the invoice" as I did, which proved to be the crucial mistake on my part. Access Montana Management, if you read this, you have significant room for improvement. At a minimum: - publish your price list publicly. - don't allow consumer sales agents to set expectations for 'business class' as a negotiation if business agents aren't going to negotiate. - have agents send out a sales invoice before service is turned on. This whole incident could've been prevented before it became a problem if this was policy. - put some kind of value-add on 'business class'. It has no speed increase, it doesn't have any kind of SLA. As far as I can tell it's "we want to charge you more money for the same residential-class best-effort service". This does nothing but annoy your higher-margin customers. It's trivial to have a secondary support number or email alias and say "these are for our business customers, incidents reported through these get priority". read more