The smaller Starlink unit is more expensive, but the monthly fee is significantly less. It's considered the travel version, but according to reviews, it does the job. After reading up on it, that’s the one we went with.
Yesterday I saw a Startlink ad on X for a promotion that offered a steep discount on the equipment purchase bringing the Standard kit down to $150 from $350. I don't see the promotion on their website so I suspect it's a promotion they're selectively marketing to X users.
Ah yes. Customer service. Hell on Earth. I for years had saved Verizon’s number under Verizon F***ing Customer Service because it was always so hard to reach someone. POSSIBLE WORK AROUND: when you call again, hit whatever button gets you Spanish. If you actually speak Spanish - yay, home free. If not, say “ooops, meant to hit English, can you help me anyway please?” Like 100% of the time the SS rep will also speak English and will be happy to help you. Game that system, son.
This actually does work. I worked Customer Service more than a decade ago but I imagine it still holds true- every single one of our Spanish speakers was also fluent in English. They took both types of calls and got a paid a bit more.
I understand your pain. You are not wrong, and you are not alone. They use AI because they hate us. When they let us speak to humans, they employ marginal English speakers to torture us. They probably listen in on our attempts to communicate and laugh their asses off. It's a giant cluster F, and I'm afraid it will only get worse (if that's imaginable). Hang in there, man.
No, you are not crazy, and you are right. I don't know what the solution is because all of the big companies are the same, so switching wouldn't help. I recently spent a total of 4 hours on the phone over the course of two months with Verizon. My husband paid upfront for his phone, but the company had added a payment plan to my bill anyway. I was transferred and hung up on repeatedly by people with Indian and Asian accents – almost none of them understood the phrase “paid cash for.” They wanted me to do their job (find the four month old receipt, find the date of activation) and would plainly tell me I had to make payments for a phone that had already been fully paid for because they couldn’t even understand the problem. Oh, and the reason it took two months? After an hour and a half, they found the initial receipt and removed the payment, but didn’t fill out the proper paperwork on their end, so it reappeared a month later and I had to spend another two and a half hours finding someone on the other end to locate the original receipt and remove the payment plan again.
Ouch. Pretty much the only way to push back is to switch to the competition - if there is any, where you live. I’ve been pretty fortunate with Verizon near me, but I mostly use the chat function.
That avoids the whole accent problem, and it should be available on the web, so you don’t need to use your phone, but there seems to be some AI associated with it.
No, I read your post on my phone and for some reason when I did, I didn’t see that. But yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. When they split up AT&T they did it in the dumbest possible way, by region rather than in a way that actually created competition.
You are 100% correct that it is abusive- not just sloppy customer service. They are trying to force us to match a business model they have put into place for their own sakes instead of a model that they know meets a consumer need (which builds customer loyalty). If we complain or cannot meet their demands, we are treated as if there is something MORALLY wrong with us.
What they are doing isn't actually business. I think of it as a type of extortion. Market solutions really won't work in this situation. I have started to wonder if this is something our congressmen can help with. If there isn't some sort of legislative pressure or financial punishment they can threaten companies with for creating customer-hostile business models and using cheap foreign labor that can't actually meet the demands of the business. Being able to communicate with customers should be a foundational matter of a business. If you are a business getting any tax or government benefits, and it is found that customers cannot even speak to you upon request and subsequently have their needs addressed, then heavy penalties should come your way. I don't like the idea of the government meddling in the market but I am to the point I don't look at these things as legitimate businesses operating in response to market forces. I think it is a form of social control and extortion. I just don't know how to go about getting that started.
It absolutely is real. Not sure how to fix this. Lately I’ve been through it w a woman in customer service (for a US company) with such a thick Indian accent that I almost just hung up when she answered, but I always start with a “benefit of the doubt” attitude.
It was an exasperating 10 minute call that ended with “you can go online to address this issue ma’am “. Unacceptable & I’d bet that if you were working for a Chinese based company & copped an attitude when their customers couldn’t understand or get the help they needed you’d probably be out of that job pretty quick…
Our modern "customer service" does everything except serve the customer. In fact, the customer is seen as a burden, and inconvenience if not an outright entity of "oppression." We see this even when engaging with actual humans in customer service and now we're seeing this attitude even in AI. It's maddening but more than that, it is demoralizing. I think it's an outgrowth of our society becoming wholly digitized. We're not people, we're "units." In fact, humans are "problematic" what with their "colonialism" and carbon footprints and all... A line that is becoming increasingly blurry between human and machine/technology. I mean, no, our phones are not imbedded in our veins, but they almost may as well be. They've made it so we can't really function in life without these god damn tech devices, as your experience just proved.
I think it's also because of this digitization and the fact that so many "relationships" are now virtual, that we have way too many people who genuinely don't know how to interact with other people. Quite literally, they don't have the skills or the instincts. At best, they see other people as a means for a transactional exchange. Cold. monotone. Sterile.
Then, there's the fact that the "agent" you were eventually connected with had an accent so thick, that you couldn't understand him, and we know that you (if you're a "good" person) should embrace that as your failure, not his and certainly not the company's. I'm really surprised how many people normalized this whole shift and so quickly. No one really talks about this, it's as though we all were just lulled into accepting this as a new and normal first world frustration of our progressive times.
Josh, as you can tell from responses already submitted - you are NOT the crazy one. The situation you described is one of the worst I've ever heard or experienced - but things have definitely been moving in this direction for quite some time. They seem to be especially acute with companies like Comcast that have horrible reputations for customer service in the first place. The sheer volume of complaining calls they receive causes them to treat calls as annoyances to be handled as impersonally and expeditiously as possible - customer be damned. I truly don't know the answer to this especially when voting with your wallet or feet isn't an option. It may only change when enough of us squawk and rebel against these inhumane systems. Hope your rant of "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" has helped.
I almost hurt myself before I will resort to calling a service company for help with anything! By hurt myself, I mean I give up and suffer whatever affront or thievery they are trying to pull on me rather than go through the ordeal of sorting out the problem.
For example, ComEd is the supplier for my electric service. When I moved to Illinois it took them nearly 5 months to even bill me and had no good answers for why after numerous attempts by phone call and email to understand why I wasn't being billed. Eventually, I got a string of bills for those 5 months that were payable all within a week apart. Nevermind. I paid the full balance due as soon as I knew what the total was. Then the last two bills were nearly double per month what they had been the previous months. Yes, these were bills for Nov. and Dec. which were the first months I actually used any amount of electricity beyond the normal, i.e., no heating. As it is I keep my house chilly enough to require extra clothing layers, sometimes a jacket and a heating pad just to be comfortable if I'm sedentary. ComEd had converted to some kind of meter system that I'm suspicious is not correctly accounting for my usage. Have I tried to contact them with my concerns? No. I don't have the patience or fortitude to go through the process, it's that torturous. This is terrible!
"I give up and suffer whatever affront or thievery ... rather than go through the ordeal of sorting out the problem." I recently went through this with Epoch Times. They were charging me $9.99 month after month as if I were a paying subscriber, but I could not access content as if I were not a paying subscriber. I tried explaining my problem online to no avail. I finally had to resort to my Visa credit card customer service. (Why is it that credit card customer service is so excellent? At least in my experience.) I had to get my old card canceled and had a new one with a new number issued, and the customer service person made sure Epoch Times could not access the new card to keep charging me month after month. The woman's last question: "you should get your money back. Would you like us to go forward with that?" I said nope. Don't bother. Fifty or so bucks is a reasonable price to pay for instant peace.
I feel your pain. I absolutely hate dealing with customer service. It’s extremely rare to get an American on the phone and even then they are mostly worthless, especially government employees, they all sound like DEI hires. But it’s absolutely infuriating to me when I get someone at a foreign call center, which is almost always the case.
Unfortunately Josh it's going to get worse. More bots and more offshore representatives with little to no training answering your call at 3AM their time. Thank god I only have four years left in the IT racket. Then I'm going to raise cats.
You are not crazy. Among my favorites is the robot prompts asking you to SAY or ENTER your account number or phone number or ZIP code or whatever, only to be kept on hold for 28 minutes, and when someone finally picks up the call the first thing they ask is for your account number or phone number or ZIP code or...
These companies are saving millions on labor with these systems, and by work-at-home call centers overseas, and they are near monopolies in their markets. No competition means tough shit for customers. Sends me into a rage every time.
California, Bay Area here. Recently we were down for a day. I went through something similar to what you described, trying to get some info. I always go through something like that with ComCast. The impulse to yell at their voice mail, absurd as that is, is almost irresistible. When I finally get a live person on the other end, it takes everything I have not to talk to them in an angry voice. I try to remember that the person in Egypt or the Philippines or wherever, is just a worker and not responsible. I often fail.
I'm becoming convinced that this sort of thing on the part of the big companies, is a form of social engineering, meant to reduce us to helpless proles, dumbly awaiting whatever they have in store for us.
I am not entirely familiar with it, but I think Starlink solves this.
I’ve had Starlink for several years now out here in red-state-flyover-country, and it absolutely solves monopolistic carriers that suck.
NICE! That's great to know.
The smaller Starlink unit is more expensive, but the monthly fee is significantly less. It's considered the travel version, but according to reviews, it does the job. After reading up on it, that’s the one we went with.
Starlink offers a 30 day trial.
Here's a breakdown from Grok on the pros and cons and a comparison of the residential unit and the mini travel unit
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_413f20c6-8326-4c6f-84be-ee5c8d69ef75
Yesterday I saw a Startlink ad on X for a promotion that offered a steep discount on the equipment purchase bringing the Standard kit down to $150 from $350. I don't see the promotion on their website so I suspect it's a promotion they're selectively marketing to X users.
If I see it again on my feed, I'll tag you Josh.
Ah yes. Customer service. Hell on Earth. I for years had saved Verizon’s number under Verizon F***ing Customer Service because it was always so hard to reach someone. POSSIBLE WORK AROUND: when you call again, hit whatever button gets you Spanish. If you actually speak Spanish - yay, home free. If not, say “ooops, meant to hit English, can you help me anyway please?” Like 100% of the time the SS rep will also speak English and will be happy to help you. Game that system, son.
This actually does work. I worked Customer Service more than a decade ago but I imagine it still holds true- every single one of our Spanish speakers was also fluent in English. They took both types of calls and got a paid a bit more.
Love that idea! But it’s unfortunate that we have to go to these levels to get help in our country’s native language.
I understand your pain. You are not wrong, and you are not alone. They use AI because they hate us. When they let us speak to humans, they employ marginal English speakers to torture us. They probably listen in on our attempts to communicate and laugh their asses off. It's a giant cluster F, and I'm afraid it will only get worse (if that's imaginable). Hang in there, man.
No, you are not crazy, and you are right. I don't know what the solution is because all of the big companies are the same, so switching wouldn't help. I recently spent a total of 4 hours on the phone over the course of two months with Verizon. My husband paid upfront for his phone, but the company had added a payment plan to my bill anyway. I was transferred and hung up on repeatedly by people with Indian and Asian accents – almost none of them understood the phrase “paid cash for.” They wanted me to do their job (find the four month old receipt, find the date of activation) and would plainly tell me I had to make payments for a phone that had already been fully paid for because they couldn’t even understand the problem. Oh, and the reason it took two months? After an hour and a half, they found the initial receipt and removed the payment, but didn’t fill out the proper paperwork on their end, so it reappeared a month later and I had to spend another two and a half hours finding someone on the other end to locate the original receipt and remove the payment plan again.
Ouch. Pretty much the only way to push back is to switch to the competition - if there is any, where you live. I’ve been pretty fortunate with Verizon near me, but I mostly use the chat function.
That avoids the whole accent problem, and it should be available on the web, so you don’t need to use your phone, but there seems to be some AI associated with it.
We clearly need more overlapping competition.
Did you notice my bolded last paragraph where I pre-disclosed that I can't switch service?
No, I read your post on my phone and for some reason when I did, I didn’t see that. But yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. When they split up AT&T they did it in the dumbest possible way, by region rather than in a way that actually created competition.
You are 100% correct that it is abusive- not just sloppy customer service. They are trying to force us to match a business model they have put into place for their own sakes instead of a model that they know meets a consumer need (which builds customer loyalty). If we complain or cannot meet their demands, we are treated as if there is something MORALLY wrong with us.
What they are doing isn't actually business. I think of it as a type of extortion. Market solutions really won't work in this situation. I have started to wonder if this is something our congressmen can help with. If there isn't some sort of legislative pressure or financial punishment they can threaten companies with for creating customer-hostile business models and using cheap foreign labor that can't actually meet the demands of the business. Being able to communicate with customers should be a foundational matter of a business. If you are a business getting any tax or government benefits, and it is found that customers cannot even speak to you upon request and subsequently have their needs addressed, then heavy penalties should come your way. I don't like the idea of the government meddling in the market but I am to the point I don't look at these things as legitimate businesses operating in response to market forces. I think it is a form of social control and extortion. I just don't know how to go about getting that started.
It absolutely is real. Not sure how to fix this. Lately I’ve been through it w a woman in customer service (for a US company) with such a thick Indian accent that I almost just hung up when she answered, but I always start with a “benefit of the doubt” attitude.
It was an exasperating 10 minute call that ended with “you can go online to address this issue ma’am “. Unacceptable & I’d bet that if you were working for a Chinese based company & copped an attitude when their customers couldn’t understand or get the help they needed you’d probably be out of that job pretty quick…
Our modern "customer service" does everything except serve the customer. In fact, the customer is seen as a burden, and inconvenience if not an outright entity of "oppression." We see this even when engaging with actual humans in customer service and now we're seeing this attitude even in AI. It's maddening but more than that, it is demoralizing. I think it's an outgrowth of our society becoming wholly digitized. We're not people, we're "units." In fact, humans are "problematic" what with their "colonialism" and carbon footprints and all... A line that is becoming increasingly blurry between human and machine/technology. I mean, no, our phones are not imbedded in our veins, but they almost may as well be. They've made it so we can't really function in life without these god damn tech devices, as your experience just proved.
I think it's also because of this digitization and the fact that so many "relationships" are now virtual, that we have way too many people who genuinely don't know how to interact with other people. Quite literally, they don't have the skills or the instincts. At best, they see other people as a means for a transactional exchange. Cold. monotone. Sterile.
Then, there's the fact that the "agent" you were eventually connected with had an accent so thick, that you couldn't understand him, and we know that you (if you're a "good" person) should embrace that as your failure, not his and certainly not the company's. I'm really surprised how many people normalized this whole shift and so quickly. No one really talks about this, it's as though we all were just lulled into accepting this as a new and normal first world frustration of our progressive times.
Josh, as you can tell from responses already submitted - you are NOT the crazy one. The situation you described is one of the worst I've ever heard or experienced - but things have definitely been moving in this direction for quite some time. They seem to be especially acute with companies like Comcast that have horrible reputations for customer service in the first place. The sheer volume of complaining calls they receive causes them to treat calls as annoyances to be handled as impersonally and expeditiously as possible - customer be damned. I truly don't know the answer to this especially when voting with your wallet or feet isn't an option. It may only change when enough of us squawk and rebel against these inhumane systems. Hope your rant of "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" has helped.
I almost hurt myself before I will resort to calling a service company for help with anything! By hurt myself, I mean I give up and suffer whatever affront or thievery they are trying to pull on me rather than go through the ordeal of sorting out the problem.
For example, ComEd is the supplier for my electric service. When I moved to Illinois it took them nearly 5 months to even bill me and had no good answers for why after numerous attempts by phone call and email to understand why I wasn't being billed. Eventually, I got a string of bills for those 5 months that were payable all within a week apart. Nevermind. I paid the full balance due as soon as I knew what the total was. Then the last two bills were nearly double per month what they had been the previous months. Yes, these were bills for Nov. and Dec. which were the first months I actually used any amount of electricity beyond the normal, i.e., no heating. As it is I keep my house chilly enough to require extra clothing layers, sometimes a jacket and a heating pad just to be comfortable if I'm sedentary. ComEd had converted to some kind of meter system that I'm suspicious is not correctly accounting for my usage. Have I tried to contact them with my concerns? No. I don't have the patience or fortitude to go through the process, it's that torturous. This is terrible!
"I give up and suffer whatever affront or thievery ... rather than go through the ordeal of sorting out the problem." I recently went through this with Epoch Times. They were charging me $9.99 month after month as if I were a paying subscriber, but I could not access content as if I were not a paying subscriber. I tried explaining my problem online to no avail. I finally had to resort to my Visa credit card customer service. (Why is it that credit card customer service is so excellent? At least in my experience.) I had to get my old card canceled and had a new one with a new number issued, and the customer service person made sure Epoch Times could not access the new card to keep charging me month after month. The woman's last question: "you should get your money back. Would you like us to go forward with that?" I said nope. Don't bother. Fifty or so bucks is a reasonable price to pay for instant peace.
I feel your pain. I absolutely hate dealing with customer service. It’s extremely rare to get an American on the phone and even then they are mostly worthless, especially government employees, they all sound like DEI hires. But it’s absolutely infuriating to me when I get someone at a foreign call center, which is almost always the case.
Unfortunately Josh it's going to get worse. More bots and more offshore representatives with little to no training answering your call at 3AM their time. Thank god I only have four years left in the IT racket. Then I'm going to raise cats.
You are not crazy, Josh. Everything is shit now.
It is not “racist” to insist phone reps speak English clearly.
Wish that could be a Trump EO. Customer service agents MUST be able to speak fluent English or they cannot be hired.
You are not crazy. Among my favorites is the robot prompts asking you to SAY or ENTER your account number or phone number or ZIP code or whatever, only to be kept on hold for 28 minutes, and when someone finally picks up the call the first thing they ask is for your account number or phone number or ZIP code or...
These companies are saving millions on labor with these systems, and by work-at-home call centers overseas, and they are near monopolies in their markets. No competition means tough shit for customers. Sends me into a rage every time.
California, Bay Area here. Recently we were down for a day. I went through something similar to what you described, trying to get some info. I always go through something like that with ComCast. The impulse to yell at their voice mail, absurd as that is, is almost irresistible. When I finally get a live person on the other end, it takes everything I have not to talk to them in an angry voice. I try to remember that the person in Egypt or the Philippines or wherever, is just a worker and not responsible. I often fail.
I'm becoming convinced that this sort of thing on the part of the big companies, is a form of social engineering, meant to reduce us to helpless proles, dumbly awaiting whatever they have in store for us.