January 2023 by motherpie
I'm adding this addendum to the review below, which was partially born of a misunderstanding on how best to contact the team for help (cell phone or text, apparently). Once reached they were responsive, and they found an issue that had our speeds errantly throttled down to the 1mbps mark. That's been remedied, and we're grateful.The overall speed question — like, if you're paying for 80mbps, how much are you * really * getting, on average? — is impossible to know, and you'll have to take it on faith that you're getting what you pay for. No third-party speed test is accurate/reliable, according to the company, and as of now, no custom tool is available for IC customers, though they are considering building one. That would be great, too!So, parting thoughts: These are 100% good guys. They're doing their best at building a business in a region that's growing like gangbusters. And we're thankful for their service, without which life in rural Western Montana would be a real drag — particularly if you rely on the Internet in any meaningful way.I wish I'd connected with them before posting the review below. There was obviously some miscommunication, and I feel bad about that. But I'm leaving it here for posterity because the frustrations expressed were genuine — and rooted in some realities that do inevitably arise when you rely on such a small business for such a vital service.The flip side of that, of course, is that big, faceless, corporate ISP providers are almost always worse!***ORIGINAL REVIEW:We live in an area outside of Missoula where there are really only two options for internet service: satellite, and these guys. We went with these guys because satellite service is almost always terrible no matter where you are, and in any case, this is a small, Montana-based operation, and we wanted to support them.The good news is: they definitely deliver internet that is faster than satellite. The bad news is two-fold:1) Speeds are never anywhere near what you pay for. We work from home and pay through the nose for the highest speed tier, which is supposed to be 80Mbps. It has never, ever gotten anywhere near that. At best we'll see 35-40Mbps. Often less. We’re reasonable people, and understand that 80Mbps is something that depends on conditions being exactly perfect, and that this never happens. But given that, we’d still expect to see some 60s here and there, maybe a 70 now and then. But nope. Never. It feels like a ripoff, but at the same time, you become reluctant to downgrade to, say, a 40Mbps service, for fear that you’ll just end up with 10Mbps service. If you don’t need the highest speeds, our advice is: Don’t pay for it. You’ll never get it and you’ll feel like a chump.2) Being a small, four-man operation, when service goes down, expect a vast black hole of silence — particularly if it’s after 5pm or on a weekend. There will be no one to call, no website to check for system status using your cell phone. No one will contact you. Nothing. You can try to call or text one of the principals, but they’re likely to be fishing or otherwise enjoying their time off, and you’ll simply have to wait for someone to get around to doing something. That might be ok when you’re serving a handful of customers, but these guys need to recognize that they are growing (which is good!) and that growth means greater demands for customer service — including having a person available to respond to outages promptly, including on weekends. The internet isn’t just recreation for many of us. It’s our business and our income, and downtime matters.So that’s the size of it. The service is great when it’s working. But they’re definitely selling false speeds, and when things go dark, you’re out of luck until service is inexplicably restored hours, or even days later.Starlink is coming, and if these guys don't pull it together, Elon Musk is going to eat their lunch, and that would be terrible, because Elon Musk is the worst.
