I’ve seen some pretty bad advertisements before, but I assumed they were all scams. The same day I got the HughesNet advertisement, I got an advertisement from Rise Broadband, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at it.
Isn’t that the most generic, scam-looking advertisement you’ve ever seen? There are two ways to know that it is Rise. One is to Google the return address and see that it matches up with Rise and the other is to call the phone number and it’s in the greeting.
Not only is the design of the advertisement extremely deceptive, but the content isn’t even true. Sure, they have a low introductory rate, but then they come back a few months later and increase the price. That low price you get is only good for six months, then it goes up $10. After 18 more months, it roughly doubles to almost three times the initial cost.
The fastest they offer in our area is 5 megabits/s, which is half of our fastest and that’s even before our upcoming speed increases. Building on the Netflix information from the last post, their Netflix speed is only 2.21 megabit/s. A lot better than HughesNet, but nothing great. It’s still not to the optimal SD performance. They only include 150 gigabytes/month of data transfer, which as we learned in the last post we wrote is more than what our average customer uses (about 125 gigabytes/month), but that’s average. We have customers that use more than that. What happens when you go over? It costs you $3.50 per 10GB of overage.
What other fees do they have? It’ll be up to $250 if you cancel your contract before it’s up. Don’t return your equipment (which we’re not sure why you’d want to keep it anyway), $300 minimum.
A sleazy advertisement for a company that doesn’t have a compelling offering. Don’t be swayed by their attempts to woo you. You’ll be happier elsewhere.