Hello, while Tnt-014 has been done and ready to go for the past 24 hours, but we can’t get it up. Tomorrow we will drive through the foot of snow on the road to go to a wi-fi cafe.

What’s up, you might wonder. Don’t we have BroadBand? Haven’t we talked up our back of the woods BroadBand via satellite?

Why, yes, we have. However StarBand (assholes) have decided to “change the contract” and introduce obscene bandwidth limits without even notifying us. I sure do wish I could change my contracts with people without even telling them… now can I only want to pay them $15 a month instead of $150!!!??? There was no listed bandwidth restricitions when we signed up for our three-year contract last fall. Their top vendor described the product, their highest end service, as being suitable for VoIP, which it never has been. Now if we use more than 480meg a day for a week – SMACKED DOWN! This is on a system sold as suitable for an entire office.

The service is SO PATHETICALLY POOR at the moment, that we can not even upload a 100k email attachment most of the time. I tried for 8 hours to upload 512kb .rar files of Tnt-014 to the server, and not one made it with a correct checksum.

Our crime? Were we pirating mp3’s? Nope. DDos’ing people? Nope again. We simply download our raw server logs, and I downloaded some windows updates, having just had a harddrive crash. After 45 minutes on hold, 15 more minutes on hold and 30 minutes talking to what may as well have been a brick wall… still can’t upload a bloody thing.

One would think that, at $150 a month, an internet account that was sold to us as unlimited, and without Direct Way’s FAP, we would at least be able to download Windows updates and upload a 30 meg podcast.

If you want to call StarBand to thank them for screwing over their customers, you may do so at 1-800-4STARBAND.

Or feel free to write them and let them know what you think about big companies pushing around legitimate users, and crying ABUSE, just for a measly 480meg a day on a system sold as USABLE BY 20 SEPERATE COMPUTERS!

StarBand Corporate Headquarters
1750 Old Meadow Road, Suite 700, McLean, VA 2210