Connectivity Restored

If it's not one thing, it's another these days.  We have been dealing with 'connectivity' issues the past day or two, but they are finally resolved.  What we initially thought was our satellite provider's fault turned out to be our wireless router giving up the ghost.   I spent over an hour of phone time with Wildblue's technical support agents Tuesday evening to rule out any problem on their end, and another hour picking the brains of my geek friends in Icechat to narrow the problem down to the router.  Yeoldfurt came to the rescue, he went out yesterday and got us a new wireless router.   He had everything hooked up and back online by the time I got home from work.  That's my 'Furt!

Needless to say, Tuesday was frustrating with all that hold time waiting for a Wildblue agent to come online and even more frustrating when it didn't turn out to be their problem.   But some good did come out of it.  We've been with Wildblue for over three years and have been considering shopping around to see if there might be a better deal out there.  Part of our motivation for shopping around was that we had been having some connectivity issues lately and didn't yet know that our router was the real problem.  But, in general, I think it's a good idea to shop the 'necessary evils' like insurance and internet providers every few years anyway.  So, at the end of my conversation with Wildblue, I asked if we had fulfilled our contract with them and what the procedure was to cancel if we decided to go with another provider.  The agent had been very professional and polite throughout the call and asked if she could put me on hold for a few moments while she reviewed our account options.  When she came back to the line, she said they did not want to lose us as a customer and offered us two months FREE.  We spend approximately $84/month for the service so two months free is a significant savings ...what a deal!  Of course, the new router Yeoldfurt bought for us yesterday was $87 with tax, but we're still over $80 ahead.  I guess the little bit of phone frustration was worth it after all.