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New Wave Communications: The Worst ISP in America
March 25th, 2010It’s hard to even figure out where to start with a company as truly awful as New Wave Communications is, but I’ll do my best to start where my problems with them started, which is as soon as the took over my local cable network from Charter Cable in Spring of 2008.
Since the very first day New Wave took over and my IP address switched to their network I have had atrocious service, and no one from New Wave cares about it. By fall 2008 I had called them no less then 10 times over a network congestion issue. I honestly lost count of how many calls I made and every single time I reached a “tech support” person, they were 100% incapable of understanding my problem and 100% unwilling to even do anything to attempt to solve it. The exact problem I was having was network congestion. During peak internet usage hours (evenings after work and weekends… basically any time I wanted to actually USE my internet), the service was unusable. My ping times would often shoot from 30ms ping times to over 500ms ping times during peak hours. Trying to use my “broadband” service for any “broadband” activities like streaming video, playing games online, was 100% out of the question. Pages would often take minutes to load, streaming even music was not even possible.
At the time I didn’t know exactly what was happening, so I took it upon myself to write a script that sent out 1 ping per minute and log the response time. After running the script for a few days I quickly realized that my problem was because of network congestion. The sad thing is, I diagnosed in a few days, what New Wave had been unable to tell me for months.
Here is one example form Fall of 2008. I was still suffering from unusable internet at this time (blue lines indicate ping times under 100ms, which was my cutoff for “acceptable” pings. Red lines indicate pings over 100ms. The taller the line, the higher the ping)
As anyone with half a brain can see, the internet functions more or less ok until peak usage hits (late afternoon), then everything goes to crap. In November 2008 New Wave FINALLY fixed the issue. It took them around 6 months to correct the congestion problems. For 8 months my internet was basically unusable.
Since then I haven’t had any serious problems with my internet. There were outages every once in a while, but whatever. It happens, and I understand that. But, I was left with a very bad taste in my mouth from dealing with New Wave for such a long time and them dragging their feet for so long on this issue, that I doubt they could ever do anything to make me happy with the service again.
Early this year I found out New Wave was offering HD service in my area. Finally, something improved over New Wave’s pretty shitty “digital” cable picture, sweet!
But, I should have known that coming from a company like New Wave that simply does not give a shit about it’s customer, dealing with them again would be a frustrating experience. Boy, was I right.
A couple months ago my cable modem gave up the ghost. The tech who replaced it mentioned HD service, and I told him I would like to sign up. He called up the main office in town and put me down for an HD receiver. Like any other truly awful company, they were out of stock and had to put my name on a waiting list, assuring me they would call me when my receiver came in. They never called. Days turned in to weeks, weeks turned in to months. I never heard a peep from them. So, I suffered along with my fuzzy cable for a few more months.
A couple weeks ago I was feeling ready to be ignored and abused by their “customer service” department again, so I decided to stop by their home office in town. I walked in and was able to order HD. They scheduled a tech for the following Thursday to come out and install it. I asked them right there if they could just give me the hardware, as I was PLENTY capable of unscrewing a coax from the old unit, and screwing it in to the new unit. She told me that was not an option and they had to come out and do that. Fantastic.
Wednesday night rolled around and we got an automated call from New Wave reminding us that they would be there to install the HD box the following morning from 8am to 10am. Wow… I was finally going to get my HD service!
HAHAHA, YEAH RIGHT! Thursday came and went. Not a single word from New Wave. They never showed up. They never called me. A week later, I still have not heard from them. Wow. Awesome job New Wave. I have never had such trouble trying to PURCHASE a product from a company like I have from New Wave. You would think that if I was willing to fork over more cash to their shit-fuck company, that they would actually want to take it, but apparently not.
The problem here just isn’t New Wave, but it’s the illegal monopolies cable companies are allowed to have over service areas. Companies like New Wave are allowed to put a strangle hold on their customers and treat them as shitty as they want, while the customer has no other option. We either take it in the two-hole from them, or we go with out. And being the geek that I am, going with out broadband wouldn’t work very well for me. So here I am. A broken desperate man, who only wants HD service in his home. Why is this so much to ask from a company?
UPDATE (4/9/2010) – New Wave has fixed my situation and I finally have HD! Read about it right here.
April 8th, 2010 at 6:04 am
Nick – sorry to hear about the problems you have experienced. Would you email me or call me with your contact information and I’ll be happy to assist.
Thanks.
Mike Burns
General Manager
573-703-5981
April 9th, 2010 at 9:12 am
Mike, I appreciated your effort to correct this. I was actually contacted my New Wave’s Marketing VP on Tuesday, and he has fixed my situation. I will be making a new post tonight about it, and will update this post with a link to that one when it does up.
April 9th, 2010 at 9:24 pm
Nick — Glad we resolved the issue and hope you enjoy our HD service.
Take care.
Mike
May 6th, 2010 at 12:30 pm
Wow now that’s damage control!
July 25th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Now wait a minute here. This guy on this rant isn’t alone here. There are OTHER customers on this service suffering from the same crappy service from this company. How about ACTUALLY FIXING your problems with customer service and the lack of skill to properly run your network? That might be nice in contrast to picking off the one guy with the guts to go public (and make it high in Google search rankings for Newwave Communications). This guy had the knowledge (and skill) to figure out your problems for you. So, this guy is happy now. But look what it took for him to get what you advertise. This makes me laugh but it also makes my skin crawl. So, should the rest of us now contact Mike Burns, THE General Manager at 573-703-5981. Hmmmm… where’s my phone?
Oh, and by the way, your website has been offline for three days. Right at the time my bill is due. I ORDERED an even additional add-on for HD channels which I can’t figure out the total price because I can’t get on the website.
July 25th, 2010 at 9:07 pm
John, I am disappointed to hear that New Wave has still not resolved apparently glaring customer service issues. As for my situation, so far everything has been fine, but I have also not had to call New Wave for anything.
I had hoped that New Wave would make some kind of change in their internal process to insure that situations like mine don’t happen again. Either no changes have been made, or any changes that were made were not enough :-\
September 6th, 2010 at 8:21 pm
I too have had noting but problems since New Wave took. I used to have both their cable tv and internet service but ending up dropping the tv due to it constantly going out and there unwillingness to fix it. I still use their internet service but i have had the same issue for over 2 years and so far i am no closer to getting it fixed than i was 2 years ago. My service is either so slow you can’t use it or it is down. The last 2 time they actually came out they changed the modem assuring me that would fix it and as i tried to explain to them that is not the problem. If they show up and the service is actually working they just say, “well it is working now so we can’t help you now” , now that is some great service. They are supposed to be here some time tomorrow but as usual they couldn’t give me a time frame. The only reason i still use them is that where i live they are the only provider but i was told that is no longer the case so i will investigate it more this week. If there is another option i know alot of people that will be dropping them very quickly.
November 25th, 2010 at 1:16 am
I have had the unfortunate pleasure of having to deal with newwave in Mayfield KY. Hands down they are the worst service provider i have ever had. i had so many problems with their television service and boxes that i had to drop them and get satellite tv for which i have had nothing but stellar service and reliability. you would think the issue of going out in storms would be that of the satellite provider but no it was NewWave that would go out in storms.
I was having major issues with the internet service of NewWave with it being totally unusable during “peak” hours. So New Wave decided to expand their pipe for more bandwidth but instead of letting folks have the service they pay for NewWave got greedy and upped their package to 15mb and the pipe was soon full again. While they have given refunds and sent out techs to do the exact same thing the previous 10 techs did the service is still crap. As of this writing my current speed maxes at at 1.78 mb and that is not even stable.
When you try to write the president per the promise thing he tosses up on the web page it is intercepted by lower managers who simply repeat the same processes that had been going on for months. Does the President actually ever see these complaints? i doubt it. I would drop NewWave internet in a heartbeat if we had any other choice but the cable monopoly rules here also.
Simply put if you can avoid New Wave Communications take a wide berth and don’t look back as you can expect nothing but headaches or “upgrades” from 10mb to 15mb when they can not even get you more than 2mb.
December 6th, 2010 at 12:13 pm
Time for round 3 for me!
Once again I get unuseable internet during peak hours. Ping times that are 300ms+ with 4+ dropped packets a min. Last two times I’ve had to diagnose the problem myself to keep them from sending a tech out just to say “uhhh i can’t fix that”. They’ve cost me over $1k in time off from work to meet people who never come or who can’t fix anything. Problem is network congestion and bottlenecking at the backbone. To me, it is fraud to market 15mb internet when a provider can even competently offer a 2mb connection.
December 18th, 2010 at 11:49 pm
Im paying for 10mbps and have only been getting about 2 of it for longer than I should have tolerated. Frequent disconnects and frustration are things I had come to think I had to just live with. My relationship with my pc is a big part of my life. New Wave is making me hate my relationship with my pc. Lots of people don’t notice that they’re not getting what they’re paying for as they Facebook, IM, and casually surf but people who play WoW while streaming Netflix movies sure as hell do.
January 13th, 2011 at 10:16 pm
well.. i guess ill add to the group.. i pay for the 15mb down.. 1 meg up gamer package.. for the last few months my speeds have been dropping drastically..tonight.. jan. 13th.. at 9 pm.. my speed is less than 1 mb down while maintaining 600kb up.. with a 300 ms ping to newwaves missouri server.. this is not speedtest.net (which by the way is way slower than that to the closest server). ive had three techs scheduled.(last one didnt even show up. just called). first one told me it was my dlink gamerlounge router that was causing the problem.. unhooked it and swapped out the motorola modem with a rca modem that had a router built in.. speed did not increase.. second tech could not find anything wrong with anything inside the house but made a guess that it was congestion and told my wife that it would take an act of god to convince the company of that so they would fix it.. third tech never showed up.. called and said he would talk with the guys in the morning to see what they thought.. im getting pings higher than i used to play online with dialup.. cmon newwave.. your not dealing with a puter dummmie here.. ive built 100′s of desktops from scratch.. setup dozens of networks… i know congestion when i see it.. and paying over 60.00 dollars a month for something that isnt even as fast as dsl at night is wearing me thin.. very tired of tech support as i called 30 minutes ago to be told they would have a tech call me in 10 minutes.. still waiting.. so mike.. youre gonna get a call either voicemail tonight or tomorrow while youre at work.. i will spread the word.. this is very unacceptable of a company.. joe golladay.. malden missouri..
January 17th, 2011 at 4:57 pm
Newwave has been nothing but a complete headache for me since October.
The channels blank out constantly and when they come back, the audio/visual is out of sync. I called I don’t remember how many times to get it fixed without any progress. Then when they finally agreed to send someone to my house “Tuesday between 8 and 10,” surprise! No one showed up. Then I called to complain about it (and about having missed out on college class hours over it) and they told me 1) that no one was in the area at that time when a Newwave van was parked at my neighbors, so close I could literally see it from my house and 2) that they had scheduled someone to come “on the 20th from 3-5,” which is funny since no one told me that and I wouldn’t be home on the 20th from 3-5.
I was also told my bill would be credited for 2 months for all the problems I had, which was great until my cable was turned of due to non-payment of a bill I was told I’d never have.
Needless to say I am more than fed up. I called Friday, paid what I apparently owe so as not to hurt my credit and put in an order for cancellation at the end of this month. We’re moving in February and I had planned on taking Newwave’s service with me and adding phone and internet to it had they done anything, anything at all to fix these issues. But nope. So now my business and my money will be going to Windstream. Something I should have done a long time ago.
January 17th, 2011 at 5:00 pm
I would congratulate you on your move away from Newwave Amanda. You’re one of the lucky few who actually has a CHOICE in their provider, so you’re free to flee this train wreck of a company.
February 3rd, 2011 at 5:30 am
i haven’t really had trouble with newwave in somerset ky and when i do i can get it fixed calling them usually. i have 10 megabit and actually get that or better sometimes. sure it goes lower sometimes but not enough to effect using it. only thing i think could change is the upload speed. .36 megabit is kinda slow now. i have the cable too but i don’t use a cable box. onyl have basic and extended cable and cables goes to the tv. guess living in the city helps with this being closer to where ti comes from.
February 3rd, 2011 at 8:40 am
Consider yourself lucky.
My connection has gone back in to the toilet.
My 10mb line is currently testing at 2mb. Awesome!
February 4th, 2011 at 12:55 am
guess i am lucky then.
it is between these too but usually closer to 9 or 10 megabit.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1141965469.png
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1141964494.png
pingtest
http://www.pingtest.net/result/33807808.png
are you using the Motorola sb5100 too?
February 11th, 2011 at 12:14 am
Consider yourself very fortunate, but keep a close eye on it. I bet it won’t last for long.
I own my modem, I don’t rent their’s. It’s a linksys cm100.
August 20th, 2011 at 9:46 am
I’ll throw in my 2cents as well – let’s face it Newwave SUCKS! We moved to Murray KY 3 years ago and had nothing but trouble from day 1! Same scenario as all of the other posts above: poor to no connection on ‘net, TV, etc. I call and call, tech come out and look dumbfounded and tell me they don’t know whats wrong. According to their equipment it should be working, but they stand in front of the TV and computer and can see that it’s not. I’m really sick of it, but they are the only game in my area except for satellite. And the people with satellite say that their reception/service is no different. Does anyone know of some watchdog or regulatory agency that we can contact? Having to pay $130/month for crappy service is just ridiculous!!
September 1st, 2011 at 9:10 pm
Well here goes. I Too have received terrible service from this company. Our phone was out for ALMOST THREE WEEKS. I have the cable internet, phone package I take care of my mother who has heart problems. I was forced to go out and get both of us a cell phone during this time. Then they had the ____ to bill me for a full month. Then there is the cable. Has anyone noticed that the good channals are always out. when you call them, Its a 45 minute wait. Then they want you to let them know when there are channels out. Just how I wanted to spend my day off. Everyday off. They promise to adjust your bill and never do. and lets not forget the recording telling you to use there web site for your problems. When it is up its basically useless unless you are paying them for services you only get half the time. I agree they have crappy service. and there prices are Too.
September 2nd, 2011 at 8:21 pm
Yet another COMPLETELY unsatisfied New Wave Communications Customer in the Bootheel of Missouri. My previous internet provider was AT&T, which unfortunately only had (and has currently) 6M speeds available in my area. On every single site that I use regularly, or even those that I used intermittently or even completely randomly, I would get a reliable ~1M give or take a few hundred KB.
Roughly 3 months ago now, I saw a New Wave tech doing an install about 5 houses down from mine on my street, and thought, “Hey, why not ask about their internet packages?” The inner geek in me was then extremely “aroused” by the concept of the 50M connection the tech told me just recently had become available in my area. I jumped on that in a heartbeat and barely batted an eye at the $105.00 pricetag. 50M was eons faster than what I had right? Surely it was worth an additional 45-50 bucks a month! When I first got the service, there was a slight improvement in streaming speeds/page loads from very common websites such as youtube, amazon, msn, google, bing, etc. Nothing to bow down in amazement of. So then I start doing speedtests on both the Windows XP Home laptop and the Windows Vista 32bit Desktop that I owned (and both worked!) at the time. These showed roughly 24-34M down speeds. (I only use wired connections.) So then I go to actually install a few games/apps/programs/updates/patches from such sites as Blizzard Entertainment, Sony Online Entertainment, Itunes, Microsoft.com and I realize I’m only getting an actual 2M down speed, which varies down to 1M randomly, but in the 3 months I’ve owned it and the tons of downloads I have done (or at least attempted) I’ve seen a total of about 12 minutes of speeds greater than 2M, and it was 5-6M on the same sites I had already downloaded these things, or had to redownload, because my hard drive died on my computer (Seagate firmware issue) a couple of weeks after receiving this internet. (My main rig at the time.) EVERY OTHER TIME I HAVE DOWNLOADED ANYTHING FROM ANYWHERE I HAVE NOT GOTTEN OVER 2M! It will reach 2M, hit 2.1, then drop to 1.6. Repeat, drop to 1.7. Repeat, so on and so forth. Never going over 2M. On this 50M connection! I have called New Wave Customer Service on the order of 10-15 times if not more regarding this exact same issue. They even sent an engineer to my house on one of these visits, and he plugs in his laptop and gets 32M on a speedtest. Like this is supposed to tell me something? I had just performed the speedtest before I ever called them, and saw what it said, but I also saw what I was getting in actual down speeds from a plethora of different sites. This could be downloading a YouTube vid with Realplayer, downloading an album from Itunes, downloading the game client for World of Warcraft, downloading the Star Wars The Old Republic beta game client, or even downloading updates from Microsoft. 2M.
So, I gathered as many details as I could about the symptoms it was exhibiting, mainly the fact that I could have the same download queued up multiple times (around 5 copies) and receive almost the exact down speeds on all 5 copies. Roughly 2M. Which is effectively 10M down. But for some reason I can only get 2M on a single file from anywhere. I then called New Wave, and spent the next several minutes attempting to explain my extremely frustrated situation to the apparently clueless customer support rep, and after a bit of this, the rep apparently thought he had muted his mic, and he actually paused for a minute then said “Shut the F*** up…” Immediately I was like, “Excuse me?” and asked to speak to his supervisor, and informed him of this incredible lapse in both judgment, customer service ability, and humanity in this individual. He (the supervisor) made sure he gave me his name/email, and said he would definitely look into this as this wasn’t the type of thing that was expected of New Wave Employees. Ya think???? Other than that he didn’t seem all that perturbed by this turn of events. Over the next month and a half or so up until now, I have called repeatedly about this exact same issue. Seeing a huge number on http://www.speedtest.net, then actually going to download something from ANYWHERE, and not getting over 2M.
This past Saturday (Aug 27th, 2011) my speeds dropped down to about 200-400KB/s with epic slowdowns to 5KB/s that was sustained over several hours. I immediately called, and they said (once again) “We’ll send a tech out.” This tech, (that I had seen several times already) seemed genuinely interested in at least attempting to figure out what this issue was, as clearly 2M wasn’t even close to what I was paying for, and he told me he would recquisition an laptop and a DOCSIS 3.0 like my own and test various points in the line up to my house. This was supposed to take place yesterday. Nothing was fixed as of this morning.
So today, I called and actually asked to speak to the on-duty technical supervisor, as clearly, all of the times I had recounted the exact symptoms I was having to the “normal” employees were either misunderstood, misinterpreted, or completely misplaced. After a 27minute hold, I then spoke to “Cody the Technical Supervisor” and then reiterated once again my situation. He at this point told me “Well, I was unaware that you were having these types of issues (i.e. the multiple files queuing at the same speed while one file only does 2M, pages taking sometimes over a minute to load (simple pages like email or bing) or especially since this past Saturday, roughly 40-50% of the sites I was clicking on were saying server not found, cannot find website, or check your internet connection, although the connection indicator at my status tray showed a valid connection, and the lights on the modem showing the same.
Cody then tells me that yes, this does sound like a modem issue, and he would make sure a tech brought a new DOCSIS 3.0 out today to see if that remedied the issue. He also told me that he was “teaking a few things” and shortly thereafter, my speeds normalized at their standard 2M.
At around 5:30, this gentleman comes to the door, a New Wave “tech”. And the first thing he does is the same thing all the other techs have done (and the ONLY thing the other techs have done) is run the speedtest.net and once again, unsurprisingly, it shows a high number, this time 42M. So at this point he tells me clearly there’s NOTHING wrong with the modem or the internet service. So I then begin recounting all of the issues I’ve had, and the fact that I only get 2M, and he says “Well, what servers are these?” I then tell him EVERY FREAKING SERVER. This obviously isn’t good enough, so we go and begin downloading things. The blizzard downloader at that was showing 2M. It would hit 2.1, then drop to 1.7. Hit 2.1 drop to 1.5, and repeat this forever. I also told him that I had downloaded the client for WoW, from the Blizzard Entertainment content servers (Blizzard Entertainment is at the very least one of the richest game developers in the world with BEEFY servers with which to handle their nearly 12 MILLION SUBSCRIBERS) and told him that 3 of the 5 guys that were in my ventrilo channel had just downloaded this same file that I had just downloaded, 2 with 30M connections getting roughly 12M and 1 with a 20M connection getting about 6.8M down, and all three had made it into the game (same size file) hours before I was able to on my 50M connection.
So Mr. Internet tech says well I’m going to go out back and check some stuff. I went and used the restroom, and went out back to smoke, and he wasn’t there. He was in fact out front, sitting in his van, speaking to someone on his cell. So then he asks me “Did you actually see these speeds these people told you they were getting?” and “They couldn’t possibly be getting those kind of speeds because the person he had just spoken with told him that no one would be able to download from them if they were pushing that kind of speed.” Unknown person on the other end of the line was CLEARLY an idiot with a capital IDIOT.
Mr. Tech guy then proceeds to in about as many words tell me that no one really gets over 2M on the internet anyways… to which I promptly replied, “So you’re honestly telling me that no one in the effn world gets more than 2M on the internet????? Are you effn serious? That is BS and you know it.” He then replied, “Well, I don’t know….”
So then I go into hardcore “You gotta believe that this is complete BS mode…” and we went into the computer and proceeded to download from several different sites where my undeniable download speeds were between 400KB/s-2.1M. He then tells me that he wants me to email him all those sites because he has the same internet I do, and my modem is showing 42M and his doesn’t show that much.
So I then asked Mr. Internet Tech what his download speeds were. He told me, “I don’t know, I just download stuff and let it do it’s thang.” This is suppsedly a high-speed Internet Technician that doesn’t even know his own actual download speeds?
So I set out to compose a list of commonly used sites with readily accessible downloads in addition to a few of the other game type downloads that he could attempt in addition to all these others (some of my examples included Microsoft where I could get nothing at all to download, and http://www.bing.com which would not load for 7 successive attempts, each time telling me that there is no internet connection even though my status tray and modem tell me otherwise) and thought to include some of the several complaints I had personally read over these past couple of months about New Wave Communications that reeked of the same S*** i’ve been dealing with all this time, and stumbled across this particular page, and felt obligated to include my own horror story. Needless to say, if this isn’t resolved by the end of this billing cycle, I’m going back to my much more reliable 6M connection from AT&T DSL.
So a word of warning to all potential New Wave Communications customers who hear 50M!!! and go “wow” and sign up, most likely you’re not going to get even 5% of what you’re paying for, and if this proves to be the case, New Wave will most certainly be rude to you, call you stupid, exhibit utter stupidity of their own, lie, and continue to charge outrageous prices for NOTHING.
Buyer be warned…
September 2nd, 2011 at 8:38 pm
P.S. I have been on computers for nearly 18 years, spent the last 14 years on the Internet, and watched more download progress bars on more varied connections than this apparent “tech” from New Wave Communications, and I’ve personally seen speeds ranging from 0.1kb/s to 28MB/s.
In addition, the tech did NOT bring another modem to see if that remedied the situation as “Cody” had promised me would transpire today.
Also, the brand-new BEAST of a computer with a Gigabit NIC, running windows 7 64-bit is getting the same hideous download speeds as everything else I’ve ever plugged into this network. An awe-inspiring, mind-boggling, whopping 2M…
September 9th, 2011 at 1:22 pm
I’m in Catlin, IL, and I had DSL Elite (advertised download speed of up to 6 Mb/sec.) with AT&T for over 5 years. I’ve checked the speed with Speedtest.net many times, and almost never saw a speed of under 5 Mb, regardless of time of day (even peak hours). I only experienced one outage in all that time, and that was due to a driver sliding off an icy road into a telephone pole. And it was only down a few hours. I had some intermittent drop offs that were due to a failing modem, which they replaced at no charge. Pretty good service considering what I’ve gotten from NewWave. AT&T set a bandiwdth cap of 100 GB a month, and charges $10 for every additional 50GB. I use the net a lot, downloading, and playing online games for hours, streaming music, and video, etc. So, I decided I’d give Avenue Cable a try. They offer 15 Mb/sec. download for a few dollars more that what I was paying for DSL, and no bandwidth cap. A month after switching to Avenue, they got taken over by NewWave. I’ve experienced a dozen outages in 2 months of service, some of them lasting all night. Speeds drop considerably lower during peak hours, but not horribly bad every night. My ping in games is about 20ms, compared to 40ms on DSL, but DSL was steady and reliable, though its max. download and upload speeds are less. Things will be alright with NewWave for a week, and then it goes to shit. It’s bad enough I’m seriously ready to go back to AT&T DSL and try and live with the bandwidth cap.
I’m getting so peeved about it, I’m wondering about trying to organize other NewWave customers to put pressure on the company to upgrade their infrastructure to deliver on their promised speeds, even if it takes a civil law suit to get them off their asses.
September 9th, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Are your download speeds taking a hit during peak hours too?
If so, this is a classic symptom of over-sold bandwidth.
September 11th, 2011 at 7:32 am
Yes, Nick, my speedtest.net speeds are lower doing peak hours often, as are actual download speeds. Some nights I’ll see tests of 7 Mbps, and others much lower, some nights 10 Mbps. Some Sundays it’s so slow it’s barely useable. On the 9th (the day I wrote my first post here), the service went down entirely, and wasn’t restored until sometime the following afternoon. It’s been really good since then.
October 25th, 2011 at 7:59 pm
How did you people even contact New Wave? I have had no internet and no TV service for nearly a week. Unable to take off work to go to the local office. Tried their online form, no response. But every time I have tried to call them at 1-888-8NEWAVE I am getting a busy signal. Very frustrating that I can even disconnect to go back to Dish Network. Even when I had picture it was fuzzy like a over the air antenna, how can they even label this garbage as high speed broadband and digital?
October 28th, 2011 at 12:56 pm
Figured I might as well throw my war story in here. This is the message I just sent to New Wave. I’ll update if they respond:
I have been stood up three times by your company. It took me almost a month to even talk to someone about turning on service, and then they were a no show. When they did show up, and turned on my internet, the internet didn’t work for almost 2 days. A few days later I decided to get phone, internet, and cable. A week and a half ago I made an appointment for today (Oct 28th between 9a-12P) to have everything turned on. It is now 12:30 and nobody showed up. I am currently on hold, and the CSR has been rude, and her very first response to my complaints was to cancel my order. I own A1 Title 42 Service in Oklahoma, as a business owner, and a consumer, this is very poor customer service. As I explained to her, cancelling my order is not a solution to my issue. The solution is to send someone out here as promised. I have complained before to the CSRs when I had to call in over and over for no show, and when the internet didn’t work, and not once was I offered any compensation for my valuable time, frustration, and aggravation. I have more important things to do than sit on the phone all day trying to get service that I already had an appointment for. Not once when the technicians were going to be late, or just not show up at all did I receive a phone call letting me know. They simply let me sit here and waste my time. I still have my Verizon DSL account as I was testing your service before I shut down Verizon. I will admit Verizon does not have the bandwidth New Wave has, but their network is stable, I have never lost connection, and my services were turned on when they promised. Their customer service is outstanding. I would like either a discount on my service, or a credit to my account for all the time I have wasted waiting on techs, and all the time wasted sitting on the phone (most of it on hold). I would also like my services turned on today as promised (if at all possible). I really hope this message finds someone who remembers what customer service is, and how important customers are to your business. Thus far I have been made to feel very unimportant to your company.
October 28th, 2011 at 6:19 pm
If you are unable to contact NewWave Communicatoins through the 1-888-863-9928 number your local office. Please try our Facebook page(http://www.facebook.com/NewWaveCommunications), twitter page (newwaveinsider), chat us, or email fanpage@nwcable.net (Chat and local office are closed Saturday & Sunday).
October 28th, 2011 at 6:36 pm
I will give credit to their Twitter account, I have always gotten a reply pretty quickly when I ask about an outage or something.
November 11th, 2011 at 7:43 am
UPDATE: It’s been two weeks since my last post, and my complaint to Newwave. They offered me a discount for 1 year taking my monthly payment for phone, net, expanded cable to $99.00 instead of $126. They offered to wave my $25 installation fee. So another appointment was made, and again I sat here waiting, and again they did not show up. No call, no show. Yesterday Newwave called me asking if we could reschedule my install.. 2 WEEKS AFTER THEY DIDN’T SHOW UP!!! NEWWAVE IS A JOKE!! I asked the CSR why they didn’t show this time, and why they didn’t bother calling me again. She looked in the notes, and said she didn’t know, but maybe I wasn’t home.. LOL.. REALLY?? Maybe next time I should have all the lights in my house on, the car outside of the garage with the flashers on, and a bonfire in the front yard.. Maybe I need to open all my doors, and windows too.. Just to make sure they know I’m here.. Have you heard of KNOCKING??? Anyway I think I’m done with these jokers.. Take care!
November 11th, 2011 at 7:47 am
Yes I intentionally misspelled waive, as wave as a pun
November 11th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
That sounds about par for the course.
Newwave seems to have a serious problem with their service technicians. They seem to have no way to track what their service techs actually do and don’t do in a day.
Newwave: Your service technicians are the people interacting with your customers. If your service technician sucks, fire them and hire new ones. There are plenty of people looking for jobs, it can’t be hard to replace them. They make you look incredibly bad. If your service technicians are over worked, hire more! Do SOMETHING to change the way things have been going for a long time over there.
November 15th, 2011 at 10:03 am
I my gosh, you people have scared me to death. We just got a letter from Comcast and they are turning our service over to NewWave. We get fantastic service from Comcast, internet and tv. But reading all the commplaints have pretty much convinced me to bit the bullet and get Direct tv. Seems like just when you think you life is going smooth someone throws a wrench in it!
November 16th, 2011 at 12:53 pm
bbb or attorney general, local media, bill o’reilly, small claims court
bad enough i bank at, ‘fifth third’ – after dealing with those idiots, i just wanted to go home and watch game 6 of the world series…freakin’ ‘newwave’ was on cue with their weekly outage (cable, dsl/phone)
next day, every where i looked, ‘GAME 6 of the 2k11 world series, was the GREATEST WORLD SERIES GAME ever(EVER) played’
it’s definitely an inconvenience – but i pay for it; does that make it a fetish?
good luck guys
November 27th, 2011 at 9:47 pm
New Wave Cable service is slow to change stations.
Direct and Dish wasn’t.
The Internet is slow like Dial-up.
The phone service was slow to call out and a lot of times not work at all.
I told them about it 4 or 5 times and they have never came to do anything about it.
So I went back to at&t, DSL and DirecTV.
December 3rd, 2011 at 9:11 pm
New Wave does suck big time.Their services just became available here in SE rural Indiana recently & after having Direct tv for many many yrs, I went with new wave’s bundle of phone,cable & internet saving me about $80.month which was what my phone bill was & also my direct tv bill was. But it’s not even worth it.My internet didnt work for more than 2 wks, I couldn’t stream netflix or anything for another week, & my phone hasn’t worked right since it was installed over a month ago.Cell phones don’t work where i live. I have spent a month on hold to talk to tech/customer service & when I get thru they say” I can rest your router”. I’ve called the president of new wave 2x.The service guys in the area are nice people, show up on time, & knowledgable, but customer/tech support all need fired.they r liArs.No one in my community can call me, my daughter lives in anearby town & no one in that town can call me, They get a recording that says my phone has been disconnected. one person who works at new wave trying to solve the problem actually asked me,”who all can’t call you, I need all the prefixes of their phone numbers?” WHen my phone was installed it worked for 1hr, the tech left, & it didnt work for the next 3 days. I had to drive a few miles to where my cellphone could work, several times in those 3 days, & they promised me they would fix it & they didnt. The only way I ever got it back on was to ask a local service tech I saw in his new wave van in the area.He came in , made 1 call, & they fixed it from the office in 5 minutes. a week later it was down for 2 days, no incoming or out going, then when they got my phone back on, my internet went out. Internet is not 5 its like old dial up speeed & gets off line on it’s won sometimes. I spent 4 hrs on hold one day, at 30 min intervals. im retired so i can do this. I told the pres, & all the techs that i have medical issues, My family worries about me if they cant speak to me daily, I cant call my dr, pharmacy, bank,post office, neighbors, utility companies or anyone in the area, & they cant call me. They got it fixed so i can call my daughter , but she still cant call me. I can now call my neighbors if i dial 1 first, it’s long distance & i wasnt informed. POint being, in over 30 days, with a phone that doesn’t work right,only one time has a tech support person ever called me back to c if they had actually fixed my d. phone. That’s because I told them to sit in their office all day & keep calling me till my phone worked, because Ive been calling them all day every day for 30 days telling them my phone doesnt work.The president called me back once, assigned someone to my case, & that was 2 wks ago & my phone still doesnt work. no one else has ever called me.I have to call them every day to tell them my phone doesnt work, & they have never sent a tech to my house about it, not that it would do any good, I told the pres. That I spent more $ in gas the 5 days I had NO phone, driving somewhere to call them, plus my time spent in 30 days calling them from home is worth something,than the discount they gave me on my bill. I asked the pres for free dvr service for a yr or 6 months for my time wasted & got no dvr. new wave knows my phone doesnt work, they don’t care, & they dont want to talk about it either.Guess I’ll try majic jack or vonage.
December 16th, 2011 at 5:57 pm
Now, I truly do know about these issues, and trust me, even us technicians have these problems. Yes, ill admit on this bash-site, I am a New Wave Com. BBT1 tech. I work in the central Illinois region and I usually get good responses from my customers about the service. Now you guys/gals have your right to bash and complain and i dont blame you for a second, I am not here to defend NWC or anything like that (which im sure i probably should, but i didnt put my real name on here for personal protection reasons)i just want you to hear me out. I worked previously for a company called Avenue cable, before NWC bought the system. If any of you ever had Avenue service, you know what bad service truly is. Yea we “offered” phone, up to 15mg dsd, but you were lucky if it EVER and i mean EVER worked…….period. And truly the techs didnt care because they didnt have to. since NWC came in, we had to care, otherwise we are out of work. I can see the changes NWC has brought to my area because i live it every day. New wave techs are usually your most helpful people ever, because we have to be, we have to meet certain quotas with re-occurring T.C’s. We are all trained and professional….most of the time, i mean, comon, we all have our bad days where we really dont feel like being threatened because someone didnt pay their bills and they feel the right to treat us like dirt, like something they stepped in and think they can just do/say to us whatever they feel. Now from reading this, you guys didnt have too many bad thing to say about the techs, mostly the call center, youve got to realize, these are people that do not have field training, they have a list of things in front of them to say and if they dont work they send us out, and then usually, the techs can fix it. There are occasions in which we cannot, due to problems that we cant resolve. Now, sometimes we do cut corners, and do not chastise me, because we all do it in our every day lives. You try to make it to 20+ houses in 8hours when each one can take up to an hour. Then after youve worked all this overtime, try getting yelled at by your boss because you didnt make appt’s on time and how theyre going to fire you if you dont “shape up”. Ill admit, our service may not always be at 100% or ever, all im asking is that people start being a little more thankful and nice to the field hands, because its us that keep the system running, not management, its us thats working out in a blizzard when the cable goes down, not the call center and its us that misses our weekends, family events, child milestones and literally have a great potential of dying all in the name of your entertainment and enjoyment of services, not you. So all im asking is please, be a little nicer to the techs, i understand that you all are frustrated,and i truly see where you are all comming from and i am in no way trying to put anyone down here, but there is no and i mean no reason to flag me down just to cuss me out because you feel like being nasty to us to make yourself feel better. Thank you, i hope you will take this message into consideration, happy holidays to you all.
February 3rd, 2012 at 9:24 am
SIGH..
1) so far have never had a problem with TV
2) so far Internet has and is giving me speeds that I have paid for
3) so far no problems with Telephone
4) So far I have called the Tech support people twice for problems that did not apply to the service of the system and both times they arrived either on time or early and problem was fixed and questions answered.
4) SORRY I cannot join in the bashing above but haven’t had any of the problems you are all complaining about
February 3rd, 2012 at 9:26 am
It’s not bashing if it’s actual legitimate complaints. Consider yourself lucky if you’ve had trouble-free service.
February 4th, 2012 at 2:42 pm
Let me join the crowd also! I had newwave high speed internet and like everyone else is saying: “It Sucks!” So, I switched over to AT&T! From what I’m hearing, newwave is suppose to be getting brought out by Times & Warner here in my area. So, I guess we’ll wait and see how good or bad that they service is around here! I have a question to the experienced internet surfers: “Which internet service provider is the best and the fastest and gives a continuous signal without losing connection and having to reset your modem by unplugging it damn near everyday?” From the area that I’m in, the only isp is newwave, at@T and our electrical company, which don’t have speeds no higher than 10 mbps! I just want a good isp at a decent price without going through all the hassle! Is it one avaible anywhere?