Complaint Review: Dish Network

I have been a customer with Dish Network for almost two years. I use both their entertainment and broadband service.

Beginning around December of 2014, our internet download speed dropped precariously during peak hours (1:00pm to 3:00am) from 5-7 Mbps (they advertise "up to 10 Mbps, but we've never seen it) to as low as .09 Mbps. I say again: .09 Mbps. This is one sixth of dialup. Had my ISP in 1995 been that slow, I would have fired them on the spot. Of course, I live in the middle of nowhere and Dish is my only option, so I decided to give their tech support a go.

This turned out to be about as useful as talking to my dog.

Their first excuse: The Router. Of course it can't be our equipment, it must be your router. Replace your router and call us back if that doesn't fix the problem. Soooo.... Dish's answer to a technical problem was to have the customer arbitrarily waste his money replacing something that works perfectly fine before investigating further?

Ah, no. The router is fine. Try again.

The next option was to send a technician. At our expense, of course. To that, we responded by telling them to just end our contract and we'd walk away. They decided to send a tech free of charge, which was the only smart move Dish has made to date. Or maybe not, because the tech found nothing wrong with any part of our system and insead said that the delays we'd been seeing were due to high network traffic.

Back to tech support we go....

Today, the cited theories for our terrible service ranged from temperature to weather to the position of the sun. I kindly reminded the person on the phone that the sun wasn't an issue at 3 in the morning. His response was to tell me to call back while the problem was manifesting so they could troubleshoot it. 

So we'll see. Do I expect resolution? Of course not. Dish knows it's the only game in town here. It knows that people will continue to pay for broadband with download speeds that weren't acceptable 20 years ago. And the problem is obvious: Dish has simply overbooked its service by offering service to too many people and refusing to make the necessary uprades to accommodate them all. And the natural reaction would be to simply drop Dish as an ISP. But I'm not going to do that. If Dish loses me as a customer, then they only lose $80 a month. But if I spread this far and wide enough to influence dozens or hundreds of potential customers away from picking Dish as a broadband provider, they lose thousands.

So this is what I will do. So long as I do not receive the service I pay Dish for, I will cost them as much money as I can. Enjoy your $80 a month, Dish. I'll enjoy costing you 100 times that.