Complaint Review: Broadstar Communications LLC - West Palm Beach FL

I am making my best attempt to objectively describe my recent experience with Broadstar Communications, LLC, a bundled (internet, TV, phone) internet service provider (ISP) whose service I have just canceled. Please form your own opinion. I choose to state the facts as they are without embellishment but with some analysis.

I have canceled my service with Broadstar Communications, LLC today and have replaced the service with a T Mobile hot spot running on a Droid tablet. The T Mobile service delivers faster and rock solid internet speed that is measurably faster than the Broadstar service I just canceled. It is interesting that the maximum speed available from 4G LTE is rated significantly slower than the promised speed from Broadstar. I have measured the seervice using a variety of methods, including ping tests (which are a good measure of latency and "RTT" time) and test FTP copies, which accurately measure "throughput" without the overhead associated with "encryption." Previously, the Broadstar service performed well and was as reliable as any other internet provider. Something has recently changed, and Broadstar has been incapable of solving the problem since I first reported the issue.

For the past month the quality of internet service from Broadstar has rapidly degraded. The service started to become unstable last week. This time the outages were significantly worse than the past. The outages have been long in duration, often preceded with long periods of poor performance. The ISP dispatched a technician who swapped out the router last week. At 9:30PM CT that very night, the same problem repeated and the service failed, with service restoring itself at around 08:30 AM CT the next day. This week the service became so unstable that I had to resort to using my phone hotspot for long periods of time. This ISP has thus far proven incapable of resolving the root cause of the outages. Customer service reps and the technicians have been cordial and professional, but have sounded like they are under considerable stress. Wait times during outages when calling to customer service have been tremendous; leading me to suspect that their core infrastructure might also be unstable.

I am an IT engineer and I work remotely from home. Reliable ISP service is critical for me to do my job. The issues with Broadstar reached a breaking point last night, with the ISP router going offline at night and mysteriously coming back on-line around 9:30CT with high latency and “pervasive packet loss." Their use of 1099 contract workers as service technicians means I would have to wait nearly a full week before someone could come out and begin to analyze the problem. I could no longer wait and had to act.

Note I do appreciate how hard it can be to solve infrastructure problems that go off the rails. The technology is complex, expensive, and difficult to analyze, often with tools that are hard to use and difficult to understand. Yet there is no excuse for Broadstar. It is possible with an effective design and enough resources in hardware and people to build high performance, resilient, and robust networks. I know this because I have helped build such networks with 99.99% uptime requirements that deliver as promised to my clients.

It is also factual to say that Broadstar's competitors have become faster, cheaper, more stable, and now offer valued new features (think of the Cox advertisement and “Daditude”). They have matured and grown more competitive; perhaps recognizing the coming threat to their business models (see below). Broadstar appears to be stuck in time, probably delivering the same level of service on inadequate infrastructure and executed with insufficient staff.

Part of Broadstar's survival may be that they often serve markets that are not profitable enough for the large ISPs to enter. But times are changing. Services like the T Mobile service I just enabled can replace the need for these "legacy ISPs” with service that is good enough. Wireless providers like T Mobile have stepped up their game and now have mature, high performance networks that deliver near equivalent service to the legacy ISP like Broadstar. And with 5G wireless service a few years away, companies like Broadstar, with limited performance, reliability, and customer service, are likely to have their business models crippled to dysfunction with a possible trajectory towards bankruptcy or merger into a larger player.

I do sincerely hope someone from Broadstar sees this posting. Broadstar must adapt, and do so quickly, or die.