I didn't call the 1-800 number…read more
I called B&T because we were moving, and I needed my Dish service relocated to our place 15 minutes outside of Redding, and I adhere to the whole "use the local guys" ethos. I was also shopping for internet service--I'd experienced the dismal performance of Frontier DSL and had struck out on fixed-wireless radio internet because I can't get a line-of-sight signal without putting up a 200-ft tower--so I asked B&T about satellite. I was told: "It works, but it won't stream video as fast as you're used to with cable. As long as you're okay with that, it's fine."
Bzzzzzztttt. Wrong.
The problem with satellite internet is not with streaming video--once your buffer is built and it's streaming away, you don't notice any difference, any more than you notice it when you're watching satellite TV. The problem with satellite internet is this: You click, and then you wait......forever. Often until the mofo times out on you, often repeatedly. If you're using internet for work/research, like I do, you spend most of your time waiting forever to reach the server, and for the server to respond back. It's the latency. It's fucking useless.
How fucking useless? We have satellite internet that we're paying for, and we don't use it.
With two or three bars out here, our goddamned Verizon cell phones are 10x faster and 100x more reliable, and we use them as internet hotspots, every day, all day. We're paying almost $100 per month for Hughesnet.con (the satellite provider that Dish uses), and we've set all of our devices to forget that modem so that the devices don't default to it. And it's a two-year contract--because any sane person would drop Hughesnet.con after a month once they got a taste of it, unless you happen to live in Bumfuck Nowheretistan and there is absolutely no alternative.
Before we gave up on the satellite internet completely, it stopped working altogether for a couple of weeks. I called B&T twice over those two weeks and left messages (because, you know, don't call the 1-800 number). No return call. On the third try the guy who picked up (Doug? I don't know) told me that I had to call Dish's 1-800 number to get help. The guys from Dish came out the third week and said that my internet dish had been improperly installed by B&T with only 2 of the 4 bolts set on one side--like a hinge--and was tilting forward. The 1-800 Dish guy fixed the dish and replaced the system with the one that hits their newest generation satellite--Jupiter 2--and said it would be faster but would still suck, because satellite internet sucks, because of the latency issue. Sorry.
He's absolutely right. The Jupiter 2 download speed is hella faster, and so what? That's not the problem. The problem is waiting......waiting.......waiting......for the downloading to start. And often it never does start, so then you get to try again.......and again.......and again.
Other people seem to be satisfied with B&T, so I'll concede that my experience may be an outlier, related only to the shit satellite internet service that B&T offers through Dish. But in my defense, I wouldn't be writing this negative review:
1. If B&T had been straight with me about how horrible the Hughesnet.con service is in the first place (like the Dish guys were)
2. If B&T hadn't dodged me when I left voicemails about my satellite internet going to shit just because they don't want to deal with it and (as it turns out) it's not really their problem
3. If B&T hadn't done a crap job of installing the dish so that we lost three weeks of the shit service that I paid for (the three weeks relating to #2)
4. If B&T had gone to bat for me with Dish and helped me get out of my contract because the service isn't performing as represented, instead of washing their hands
Here's what might happen next: Doug will attach a comment asking me to get ahold of him. I'm probably going to ignore that, because I'm going to assume that his interest isn't that he suddenly wants to help me. If he wanted to help me, that would have happened already, and I wouldn't be writing this review.*
Why two stars instead of one? It's in recognition that B&T has a lot of 5-star reviews and must be doing something right. As for me: Meh, I've experienced better.
