Skybeam is my ISP – in fact my only choice for broadband with any speed at all. I pay for their fastest service, 7 Mbps. Given I live in a rural part of Colorado, I’m happy to have Internet service at all, but I really rely on the high-speed link.
Imagine then, my consternation, about ten days ago, when suddenly my link acted as though someone was throttling it! My usual download speeds of up to 5 Mbps suddenly is around 1 Mbps, or even slower. Often that’s not even fast enough to look at my own YouTube videos! Everything else seems okay – ping times are normal, etc. It seems as though their support staff is simply in over their heads. In fact, last week, one of their reps came to our home and pronounced everything here absolutely fine. He said that “they” were working on some routers and didn’t know which way was up – and they certainly weren’t listening to him!
Normally Skybeam is pretty prompt at fixing problems. Not this time. I’ve called every day since the problem began, and no one on the other end of the line seems to know what’s going on. I finally spoke with the Level 1 supervisor this afternoon, and he promised to push on it a little bit, but I told him I’m frustrated to the point of blogging about it and if not fixed by tomorrow, I’m asking for a rebate on my payment, given that I’m not getting what I’m paying for.
If this doesn’t clear up really soon (a couple more days), I’m going to put some serious thought into persuading OurayNet.com to extend their service to where I live. Shame, really, since I’ve pointed quite a few people at Skybeam, one of the few truly broadband services (usually!) that covers rural areas.