Bad Clear experience in Austin, TX – User Submission by Kevin S.
February 11th, 2010 | by Tim |A company called PMG, Llc came to my door and a really likable salesman made a really good pitch for Clearwire service. Having been on a really sorry AT&T DSL connection for months, I was ready for something new.
When he promised a 6Mb downsteam that would be on within minutes, I went for it. The connection was only about 1Mb, but he gave me a line about “optimizing their towers.” He said it would be up to 6Mb within a couple days max, and if, for some reason, it didnt come up to at least 4Mb I would be refunded 2 months of service. So what he said was that I had 2 months to try it and if it didn’t meet the guaranteed speed, it was no cost.
The speed never went above 1Mb. In fact, more often than not, it was completely unusable. I had to move the stupid modem around about 10 or 12 times per day just to get a connection. After they started billing me, I called the PMG rep (who I still thought was a Clearwire rep) to see when my credits/refunds would happen. He said after a full two months of billing that Clearwire would credit them. Well, they didn’t. So I called Clearwire directly, and proceeded to do that whole process. Call, wait on hold, go through the “trouble shooting routine.” Yes I rebooted my computer, rebooted my modem, moved the modem about 10 different places, stood on my head, counted backwards from 20. UGH. The crappy thing is, every time you call they try to make you repeat that process even though your account says you did this already. They use every stalling tactic in the book, they put you on hold for an HOUR. Your reward for waiting? I highly trained, slick talking “escalation officer” that is mean, gruff and unhelpful.
After all this I just thought, “You know what, this isn’t worth it. I have spent hours and hours of my life on the phone with this company, getting nowhere, I will just cancel the service and cut my losses.” Nope. They want to hit me with a $112 termination fee. This is for a service that doesn’t work as advertised, that I never signed any
paperwork for, that I never even did what they say was a “digital signature.”
Well, I’m done with it. No more calling Clearwire. I’m calling the BBB and lodging a complaint. They hire shady fly-by-night companies to peddle their crappy service, don’t honor their guarantees, provide a terrible customer service experience, try to sneak fees in when you terminate, and just generally reek of bad business practices.