Russell Petrick, disgruntled former Peak Internet customer, posted bad reviews online about his former ISP (on: Yelp, SuperPages, Better Business Bureau, and Yahoo) and is now being sued for an undetermined amount of money.
According to Techdirt:
Russell Petrick is disabled and spends a lot of time on his computer at home. He signed on with Peak Internet for web access to watch movies and surf the net. "It was just too terrible to consider keeping," Petrick said when asked about the service. He said he was paying $50 a month for Internet download speeds of 20 mbps... Petrick claims the speeds were nowhere near that, and averaged 6.5 mbps. "The fastest speed I got was 13.6 mbps download and 3.1 mbps upload," Petrick said. "I didn't get anywhere near the 20 mbps mark."
It seems that Peak Internet's view is "ISP to customer: thanks for paying for a 20 Mbps connection speed. Anything above 4 Mbps is bonus speed. Stop complaining."
A customer who can only approach the speeds of a connection priced at half what he's paying obviously isn't going to be happy, but rather than work towards improving connection speeds, the company apparently decided to defer to its fine print. This isn't a great way to provide customer service and suing someone over bad reviews is an even worse decision.
Here are The Suit for Your Viewing Pleasure [pdf], Complaint Teller County [pdf], and the KOAA5 News Report.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Monday August 04 2014, @11:24AM
No, 3 providers is an oligopoly. One providers is a monopoly. Hence the use of the root "mono", which means one.
(Score: 1) by CirclesInSand on Monday August 04 2014, @12:43PM
Don't be fooled by an arbitrary construct of identity. What's important isn't that they are legally considered separate corporations, what is important is that they are together the only providers and are working together to keep it that way. And they will not make greedy choices at the expense of each other (at your expense yes, but not at each other's expense). They may as well be 1 organism.
(Score: 1) by khedoros on Monday August 04 2014, @07:31PM