Midwest Satellite Systems

I signed up with them for Internet service because I wanted local service and someone to call if there were problems. Turns out they simply resell the big brands. I expected long latency on satellite, which is true. But the service also goes out every time it rains, snows, or a cloud goes by, and we use up the monthly cap (10G) in about 2 days based on our usage. If we use it for Amazon Instant video, Amazon picks the highest resolution HD video because of the speed, which eats up the data cap even more quickly. The guy at Midwest Satellite seemed nice enough and when I talked to him about the problems, he said I'd never initiated a service call - which is true. There's nothing they could do with a service call to fix the inherent problems of latency, clouds, and the services that they resell. If they offered more useful services (e.g. setting up load balancers and failover with existing slow DSL lines or cell-tower based Internet) that would be a different story. I've been paying for the service for over a year now, and it's just not working out, so I want to cancel. Well, the local folks can't do that, so I was on hold for half an hour with Dish. Their sales folks answer right away, but their support staff has a long wait. Turns out I don't have Dish, I have Exede. Exede support is much better, and they were able to take care of my request (while paying a cancellation fee for each month in the contract). So, I'm glad the local folks were able to give me the option between Dish or Exede, but in the end all they did was the install. And based on customer service experience, I'd never recommend Dish.