In a recent poll of customers and their satisfaction with customer service cable and satellite providers have been ranked the lowest, dropping 3% since the first survey was performed last year. This drop in satisfaction with customer service is even more pronounced for cable companies who many customers are out of touch with their needs. The survey performed by the CFI group found that cable and satellite companies failed to help 20% of customers calling them for assistance, something which may be attributed to the growing complexity with cable and satellite company offerings.

The survey additionally showed that the percent of people who looked elsewhere for help including online, fell by half to just 17%. With more people going straight to the company for help it's no surprise that customer service representatives, under a deluge of support calls, are found to be unable to effectively handle an issue or seem uncaring. Still it's sad that these companies have a disorder, I refer to as the cable company complex, in which they believe customer's will stay no matter what, because the competition doesn't exist. Direct TV has been cashing in on this dissatisfaction with its recent "You deserve better than Cable" advertising campaign, which sadly sums up my experience with cable customer service.

Late last year during a service call to figure out why my HD reception was better described as LD or Low Def, a "glitch" caused my cable box to become de-authorized, which prompted the first of many calls. Time Warner was able to quickly turn my box back on and to their credit they had improved the HD picture quality, however several months later a large bill showed up including an additional cable box and a PPV movie purchase.

It was a great day in the North woods when we laid our 56k dial up modem to rest and undertook the next phase of our Internet entrepreneurial experience, or so we thought. We took the plunge, shelled out half a grand and had HughesNet mount a satellite dish on our front deck. "This'll be great," I told my wife, "We'll finally be up to speed." Little did I know, at that milestone moment, that my blood pressure was going to rise much faster than my download speed has.

The installation went fine. The fellow was thorough and adept. With his independent contracting work I have no issue. The problem lies in the service I receive from my new ISP. Suffice it to say that I almost wish I had my dial-up connection back.

Since hooking up to HughesNet, I'm sorry to say, we fail to successfully complete 1 out of 3 page loads. Messages such as "The server is busy," and "The connection has timed out" have become all too familiar trade words.

At first I thought the situation was par for the course. I assumed that our ISP was outrunning the outlying servers. However, that notion quickly faded as I did a bit of further testing and experimentation. It is my conclusion that the problem is specific to HughesNet.