Three weeks ago, I made the decision to purchase the newly launched Exede, High Speed Satellite service offered by Viasat (formerly WildBlue).  Unfortunately for me, my home requires a signifcant expense to hook up to the local cable service.  I have been suffering along with a fairly decent DSL connection (3 down .75 up).  After learning about Exede however, I thought it would be worth a shot.  They offered excellent download speeds (12 down 3 up) and based on some test users reviews, latency wasn’t too bad.

I writing to tell you, not only is latency an issue, it makes the service nearly unusable.  Granted, I live in Michigan and we have weather issues, but our HD Directv almost never fails.  And it pushes the same KA band as the Exede broadband service.  I don’t know enough about the technical issue behind Sat Broadband, but I have given this service a 3 week test run and can say with great certainty, the service is so unrealiable, that its unusable.  Oddly enough, when I called WildBlue to discuss the termination process, the woman I spoke with, very pleasant and sympathetic, suggested I document and or call every time I have an issue (which would have been 12-15 times a day). Because, she said, maybe they could work with you when you terminate.  I guess she was suggesting they would not charge me?  Didn’t matter, I knew all the term and conditions when I bought the service, so I know I have to eat the loss.   I am canceling the service on Feb 25 and making the $$$ investment to have cable run all the way back to my home.  

In fairness to Viasat, their service is delivered via Satellite.  Satellite’s are 22K miles into space beaming a signal to my house, of course its gonna have issues.   I didn’t expect it to compete with Cable.  I did however expect it to be usable for $129/mo.

Some other very notable issues.  I bought the 25GB package (yup, its capped).  With a 3 member family, moderate users, 25GB is simply not enough.  So what happens when you hit the cap? Your services is throttled down to completely unusable speeds.

So the expensive lesson here?  Don’t accept “no money back guarantee” when you can’t test drive it.  That’s right, I had to spend $400 to try the service.  And now that I am canceling, I have to pay a $350 termination fee ($15/mo for remaining months).  So $750 to experience Viasat - Exede and the experience was ABYSMAL.