I've had Surf Air Wireless (formerly known as Airbaud) ever since I've moved out here, about 10 years ago. Quite frankly, the only thing they have going for them in this area is they're the only "decent" ISP available.
The price is nowhere near worth it. However, if you live in an area like mine and you have no other options, you have to pay it or you won't have internet, period. Let's be honest here, in today's world, high speed internet is an absolute necessity.
I mean, paying $69.95/mo for up to 10mb/s download and up to 2mb/s upload is outrageous! How can anyone consider this a "great rate?" There are ISPs out there that offer ten times that speed for the same price or even cheaper! Unfortunately for me, they're not in my area, otherwise, I'd drop Surf Air Wireless in a heartbeat.
Not to mention the service not being all that reliable. I've experienced on numerous occasions where my internet drops entirely for a few minutes. This has been at it's worst the past week and it's so irritating. This has also been happening after every single storm, severe or not.
Their customer service is awful. They have little to no knowledge of networks and the ISP in general. Every time I call, I get the same almost automated response "try resetting your router and unplugging the flat cable from the power." I've even had a customer service rep tell me "I'm not the guy that can help you with that" about an issue with the internet connection and he didn't even direct me to that person.
I've had their tech come to my house to look at the receiver several times. Each time they decide to switch which tower I'm connected to. "This one has less traffic" or "This one has a better connection" and it's every time they come out here, they switch it. Well, between the two towers, I've not seen any change in reliability.
A while back I was arguing with a manager via email about slow and poor service. The last thing he said was we've downloaded quite a bit a data in a short time (I think it was 7GB in about 3 or 4 hours) then he refused to continue answering my emails. I tried explaining that I was downloading a patch 6GB in size for a game. This was long before they added a data usage cap for their packages. Needless to say, that was extremely poor customer service.
Now they have a cap on data usage for each package. Why is this ridiculous? Well, the package I'm paying for claims to be for hardcore gamers, which should be perfect for me. We've entered an era where games can be downloaded digitally as well as kept up-to-date regularly. Games can be up to 80GB in size (some may be even bigger). I downloaded GTAV, which is a solid 70GB alone and that was about half of the data usage cap already. Game updates happen frequently, I've seen some as large as 10GB. With a data usage cap of 150GB, that's ridiculous. You can go over, but you're charge another $1 per 1GB you go over. On top of their already absurd price.
Surf Air Wireless is ok at best. The price is far too steep for such a low speed that's not even reliable. read more