M-33 Access, My Experiences...
Written: Nov 16 '07 (Updated Nov 16 '07)
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Pros: Internet access in Northern Michigan
Cons: Downtime, latency issues, rude employees, inaccurate billing, shoddy service, dishonesty, bad attitudes
The Bottom Line: My experiences have been terrible! Shoddy service, poor support, inaccurate billing, dishonesty, incompetence, belligerence... This is not your only option!
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| kelly60's Full Review: M33 Access |
What They Offer
Dialup accounts are $14.95 per month, plus a $19.95 setup fee for unlimited surfing. They do have an 8 hour connection limit, and when I had my dialup account, I often had a difficult time getting re-connected once I was disconnected. Staying connected for 8 hours is also not likely, at least not from my experience. I know that I had a lot of disconnection problems, and so have many others I have talked to. They also offer what they call a family plan for $9.95 per month which provides 100 hours of internet access per month.
Wireless service ranging from $44.95 for 256K up to $79.95 for 512K for residential services, although these numbers are not representative of the speeds that we got through their wireless service. They also have wireless service available for businesses at a higher rate.
They offer DSL as well, starting at $29.95 per month, although it is not as widely available as either the dialup or the wireless. I know that they offer ADSL and SDSL, but I don't have a lot more information to share on the DSL since this service has never been available at my house.
Although there seems to be no mention of T-1 on their website, the owner of the company called me and invited me to switch from our faulty wireless service to their T-1 service. Unfortunately, after all of the wonderful things he told me about their T-1 service, it turned out to be a poor choice as well. The speeds were nowhere near what was claimed, the latency issues continued, and we had connection issues right from the beginning.
They offer telephone services as well, including both traditional land line and VOIP service. Their land line is probably comparable to your regular telephone bill. When I got the T-1 they convinced me to get the VOIP along with it however I was really sorry that I signed up for that. For the entire time that I had the VOIP, I was unable to make a tollfree call from my telephone, I could not carry on a single conversation without the voices breaking up, there were times when I wasn't able to use the internet while someone was on the telephone because their calls would continuously drop, and there were times when the telephone would not work at all.
The above is just a brief overview. I know that what I have written below is very long, but I would recommend that you read it if you are considering signing up for their services, especially if you plan on getting involved in any type of a long term contract.
My Experiences
My internet access was shut off with no warning last week because the owner of M33Access was upset with an article my son wrote about the shoddy service that his company has supplied me with over the past several years. Although I have been displeased with the service, to say the least, I have done nothing to deserve this kind of treatment by their company.
Not only was my internet shut off, but since my telephone had been switched over to VOIP through the T1 service that I had recently set up through them, my telephone was also disconnected at the same time. After borrowing a cell phone, I made a telephone call to the owner who said that that had not been intentional, and my telephone service was restored.
During the course of our conversation, the owner informed me that he saw no reason why we should continue doing business since we were obviously so dissatisfied with their service, and that he was canceling our service. He stated that he would have his accountant figure out what they owed me and give me a "generous refund" whatever that means... I guess we will see, for whatever I may have been billed that I didn't receive. Personally, I don't feel that the service is worth anywhere near the price that they are charging, but it does bother me that I just paid $200 for required line conditioning in order to switch to this "service" only to have them turn it off through no fault of my own.
Before the end of the conversation, it was a virtual shouting match. He began yelling at me about how he took what my son had posted on the internet about his company personally and how after everything they had done to try to bring high speed internet access to our area he didn't appreciate everyone putting them down. It was quite obvious by the way he talked that we haven't been the only ones complaining about their internet service.
I am sorry if he has had a bad day, but that is no excuse for taking it out on his customers anymore than the vice president of M33Access had any right to start yelling at my son a few weeks ago when we went into their office to dispute a bill and asked about a refund for a week and a half of a service that was not working. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't like to pay for a service that I don't have, and I don't think that it is very good customer service when the vice president of any company gets in someone's face and starts yelling at them for so much as asking about it.
Now, normally I am not the type of person to lose my temper but I have bit my tongue and not said much about this for far too long. I think that it was pretty low of owner the owner of M33Access to shut our internet access off with no warning. I also feel that any grown man who needs to have such temper tantrums as this man did is not cut out for the business world, especially if it means dealing with customers.
We are not the only customers who have had problems with the internet access provided by M33Access. The owner gloated that they have a monopoly in the area, stating that they are, “the only ones who even try to provide high speed access to the area when nobody else will” and he went on to say that he is tired of everyone complaining about their service. It sounds to me like he is getting complaints from more than just one or two customers. I know that I have heard other people talk about the problems that they have had. Most of them have already found new ISPs, but just in case they are still stuck with M-33 Access, I will not bring up any names here because I do not want them to lose what internet access they have because they had the guts to speak the truth like my son did.
In any case, the customers I have spoken to have mostly been dial up customers who could not stay connected for any length of time and then having a hard time getting reconnected again and/or who had such a slow connection speed that it was nearly impossible to accomplish anything. Sometimes it would take a half an hour or more to get through to anything more than a busy signal when trying to get reconnected.
I know that when I had them as a dial up ISP several years ago, these were some of the problems that I dealt with as well, and even though I paid for "unlimited internet access" they complained that between the various members of my household we were on the internet so much. When I called to complain about being disconnected from my dialup so much, they told me that I wasn't allowed to have it set to automatically redial when I was disconnected so that my unattended computer would stay online all of the time. I told them that my computer was obviously attended or I wouldn't be calling them. Eventually they stopped cutting me off every time I got online, although I still had the disconnection problems at least they were a bit less frequent. The speed never did pick up and the reconnection problems continued.
Eventually they announced their new wireless service that was supposed to be the end of my problems. Yeah, right. The wireless service was supposed to give us internet access with higher speeds, greater reliability, and from what they told me they would run our phone through the internet, saving money on the phone bill as well. Altogether, the bill would run just a few dollars more than the dialup plus the phone bill, and the internet would be much faster and more reliable, plus we would be able to use the phone and the internet at the same time, and set up multiple computers if we wanted. I was told that with a three year contract the equipment would be included, so I agreed to have them hook things up.
The day they came out to hook things up, they installed a wireless grid on my antenna after checking the signal strength where the old satellite dish used to be. They came into the house and set things up and brought the contract to me to sign. They never said a word about the additional $200 that was tacked onto the contract without a word, they just added an extra $200 piece of equipment to the bill that I wasn't told about and expected me to pay for it without even knowing anything about it. I told them that I hadn't agreed to it and they said that they had to install an amp to get a good enough signal. Well this is a bunch of crap! They should have told me this before they hooked things up and given me the CHOICE to decide whether or not I wanted to pay an additional $200 for equipment instead of billing me for something that I hadn't agreed to.
After I told them that they might as well take their equipment right back down, they called the office and had me talk to someone in charge of wireless sales. Even though I still ended up paying for the $200 amp, he agreed that I could pay for it in $10 monthly installments instead of the $200 charge that they wanted to bill me right away. Although I really couldn't afford the extra $10 per month, I agreed to make the payments rather than go through the hassle of starting all over again. Afterwards, I signed the contract and they left. They did not leave me a copy of the contract, although they were supposed to send me a copy but never did.
For months after the installation, I put up with inaccurate billing constantly. One month my bill would have the $10 amp payment toward the $200 amp that I had to buy. The next month the bill would include a $15 amp rental fee. I told them that I wanted the bill straightened out if they wanted me to pay it, and at one point in time they actually shut my internet off because I was late on my payment because of it. All I asked was that they corrected the bill before I sent my payment, and they shut my internet off because it was to difficult for them to correct their inaccurate billing instead? Oh well, just another example of their incompetence!
For the past three years I have made multiple attempts to get a copy of the contract, including three trips to their office to request one in person. They have always come up with one excuse or another not to give me one, including that they didn't know where it might be, there wasn't anyone there that could print one, and that there wasn't anyone there that had access to the files at the time. The last trip I made to their office, the vice president actually told me that he didn’t know if they could find it, and when I insisted, he said that he didn’t know if they even had it around anymore! Come on, what kind of company doesn’t keep the contracts they have their customers sign available… unless of course they have something to hide!
Right from the beginning we were having trouble with our wireless service. Although we really didn't know exactly what to expect from wireless, we did expect higher quality that what we got. Our service cut out quite often and would be really slow at times. Within the first couple of weeks (maybe sooner – I have copies of some of these reports from my account, but they have a tendency to hide reports so that the customers don’t have access to them for future reference so I don't have all of them) we were already having to call them to complain about internet outages and latency issues, and this continued throughout the entire three years of our contract. In fact, of the 43 reports that I was able to salvage from my account just before they locked me out, 19 reports included a mixture of notes regarding my account status, including everything from payment status, credit card charges, my amp payment schedule, when the amp was paid off, new customer information, the fact that I was even interested in wireless, etc. The remaining 23 of these were a mixture of internet outages and latency issues that were serious enough to cause problems and the issue with my VOIP which made it impossible for me to dial any toll free telephone numbers during the month that I used their service. This last report remained open with no assistance during the entire month that I used their “service.”
Every time our internet would quit though, they would tell us to reboot our router, and then check our ping times, and tell us the same thing over and over. We went through it so many times that it is ridiculous. Sometimes they would give up and reboot the tower itself when they would finally admit that it wasn't on our end, but usually they would just tell us that it had to be something on our end, usually our faulty equipment or a computer virus. Quite often it would be nothing more than the tech support guy telling me that he would put a note in our file, which never got any results. Often they would claim that the problem was fixed, even though nothing had been done. It gets very frustrating to deal with people who either don't know what they are doing or just don't care enough about their customers to provide any better service than this.
Not only that but we were not able to do some of the things that we were able to do with the old dialup service such as send pictures on Yahoo messenger, or host online games. After several phone calls to them, it was determined that we needed to pay an additional $10 monthly for a 1:1 NAT service to enable port forwarding. So, you guessed it, we ended up paying an additional $10 per month in order to have the port forwarding added to our account. It would have been nice to know about all of the extra hidden charges and added fees before I agreed to have the wireless installed, but at least it was faster than the dialup when it worked and it did free up the phone line.
It did end up costing me quite a bit more than expected though because not only did I end up paying the extra $200 for the amp that I wasn't told about, and the $10 per month for the port forwarding that I wasn't told about, but considering the unreliability of the service, I decided against transferring my telephone over to the VOIP. After all, if I couldn't rely on an internet connection so much of the time, I didn't want to lose my telephone service every time the internet went down or decided to go as slow as what ours was. So on top of all of the extra fees that I ended up paying for our internet service, I still ended up paying for our telephone bill besides. When all was said and done, instead of a difference of about $5, I ended up paying well over double what I had been paying before and still having to call their customer service on a regular basis.
Speaking of customer service, they used to have a 24 hour customer service number, and we often ended up calling them at all hours because of internet problems. I liked the fact that the tech support was 24/7 so you had at least a decent shot at catching someone there most of the time. Now they have cut back on their tech support hours, and although I won't mention any names, there is one of the tech support guys who always told me, no matter what the problem was that the problem has got to be on our end, and never took me seriously about any problem I may have. When I told the vice president about some of the things that he had said, he agreed that this employee should not have acted this way, although I did not receive an apology from anyone at the company for this behavior, I was simply told by a couple of people there, including the vice president, that I should just call tech support with my problems before noon so that I didn't have to talk to him... Let's see, that limits MY tech support hours to practically nothing, unless I wish to wait for 10 rings to get a message that will tell me to wait for another message to tell me that I can leave a message and someone will call me back. Then if I am lucky I might get a call back, but it will probably just be the guy that I was talking about above, so why bother?
When requesting technical support to fix the problem though, they seemed to have the same attitude anyway. There really wasn’t anything they could do but come out to the house and see if there was an alignment problem or something. They wanted us to pay for a service call to come out and look at it, but like we told them though, the problem has existed from the beginning, and we didn’t feel that it was right for them to charge us for their mistake. Eventually, my sons climbed up to the top of our tower (at their suggestion) and looked toward their tower. They discovered that it had been pointed directly through two trees.
For the past three years our signal was disrupted constantly because of the incompetence of the installation crew, who pointed it through the trees rather than finding a clear path to the tower, but they didn’t care, we would still have to pay if they came out and got any better signal. If not, they would cancel our contract and take the equipment when they came. What kind of a deal is that? It sounds more like blackmail than customer service to me.
Anyway, my three year wireless contract with M33Access was about to expire when the company president called me up and asked me to switch to their T-1 service. At the time, I didn't even know that they offered such a thing around here and I was sure that even if they did that I wouldn't be able to afford it. He spent well over an hour on the phone to me plus a good bit of time on the phone to my son to convince us that we should switch over to the T-1 service instead of the wireless because the service would be so much better for us. He told me that our bad signal was causing so much noise on the tower that it was making the internet connection bad for everyone, so he wanted to give me a great deal on the T-1 to keep me as a customer while reducing the noise on the tower for the other customers.
From what he said, we should not have the high ping times that were constantly plaguing us with the wireless. I asked him specifically about the packet loss because I was concerned about the VOIP service before switching our telephone over, and was reassured that it wouldn't be a problem. He told me that I my telephone service may be similar to that of a cell phone, but he never told me that it would be similar to a cell phone in an area where you got no signal.
Since switching over to the T-1 and getting the VOIP through them though, I have not been able to carry on a single conversation where I did not hear the voice breaking up. There have been days when I couldn't load a single web page when someone was on the phone without dropping the call. We have had days when the telephone did not work at all. I have seen some lousy cell phone service, but even my worst cell phone experience was better than that. I don't see how this company expected anyone to be happy with that. Not only that, but I haven't been able to make a single toll free telephone with my VOIP. Every time I try to make such a call, the second the last number is dialed, I get a busy signal. It kind of defeats the purpose of not having long distance to save on costs. I complained about this a month ago and was told that it would be fixed, but it still isn't. For the entire month of October, every time I needed to make a toll free telephone call, I either had to borrow somebody's cell phone, or go to a pay phone. Is this sad or what?
When they came to set up the T-1 though, they just showed up with no warning too. Like I told them, I wished that they would have let me know when they were coming so that my son could have been there. I would have preferred to have someone here that knew what they were doing so that I could have made sure that it was done correctly. Instead, they came in and started messing around with things, and got a password for our wireless router from my younger son so that they could hook things up.
While they were hooking things up, they remarked on several occasions that they didn't know why things didn't work, and they went on to try something else. After a while they went out and sat in the truck for a while, I don't know... cigarette break, frustration break or whatever. Anyway, when they came back in they wanted me to sign a bill for some parts that I was told I wouldn't have to pay for. The bill was in the amount of $90; remember this number because I will be referring back to it in a minute...
I refused to sign the bill, telling them that the owner told me the equipment was included in the contract and that I was not to be charged for it. They said that wasn't the way it was usually done, but that they would let them know at the office and let them work it out with me. As soon as they left I discovered that only the main computer worked, and only in windows, not in Linux which is the main operating system used on the computer.
The other computer no longer worked, although it should have if they hadn't changed the configuration settings on our wireless router. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they hadn’t specifically asked me if we used a laptop, and they were told that there was a computer run from the wireless router so it wasn’t like they didn’t know about it or anything…
I called their office and was told by the secretary that she would try to catch them since they had just left, and if she couldn't, she would have tech support call me right back. I waited and neither happened. Eventually I gave up and called them back. Tech support decided that I should hook the computer up myself, and they wanted me to reconfigure the router. I'm sorry, but their guys messed it up, their guys should fix it.
They told me that they would have to charge me a service call for someone to come out and fix it, and then decided that their guys couldn't come back and fix it because they don't mess with the customer’s equipment... Excuse me, but why then did they need the password to our router? Why then did they change the IP addresses in the router so that they didn't match up to anything? The computers worked before they configured our equipment (which they don’t do) so why can’t they come back and undo whatever it was that they supposedly didn’t do in the first place! Anyway, my son showed up later on and fixed their screw ups, but all of these problems never should have happened, and wouldn't have happened if they had let me know ahead of time when they were coming so that I could make sure that he was there to make sure that things were done right in the first place.
Next, I get my first bill since the change to T-1... Our original quote from the president had been around $95, which after several emails and phone calls back and forth asking for specifics, hidden charges, and a complete breakdown of everything turned out to be $135 plus a $200 fee to have the phone lines conditioned. Including the $55 for the previous month that was due by the first of the month, somehow this $400 that I planned on paying on the first of the month turned into a bill for $525 instead. Now here is where the $90 I mentioned earlier comes in... Because I refused to pay the $90 for the equipment listed that I was told would be included in the price, the bill now states that the $90 is for labor and service, with $0 listed by each of the equipment items, and the $90 listed as a charge for labor instead!
Before I would pay any of this we took a ride down to their office to try to straighten things out since I have learned from past experience that it does no good to try to talk to them over the telephone. I asked to speak to the owner, and was told that he wasn't there. I was told that he was probably out to lunch. I said that I would wait. The secretary said that he might be gone for a couple of hours, and I told her that I would wait because I needed to discuss this with him since he was the one that I had originally worked out the deal with and he was really the only one who knew what was going on. She insisted that I talk to the vice president, and eventually typed something into her computer, telling me that she was trying to find something out about the port forwarding issues I had told her about. Then out stormed someone who I later found out was the vice president of the company.
I don't know what she typed into her computer, but he came into the office with a nasty attitude. He stormed into the room bellowing about tearing down their equipment and canceling our internet if we weren’t happy with their service. It wouldn't be so bad if we hadn't just wasted $200 for line conditioning that was required in order for them to hook the T-1 up in the first place!
Now after all of this they hurry up and request that I return the wireless equipment to them. As per the agreement, I was to exchange the wireless equipment for the T-1 equipment at no cost. I returned the equipment when the guys showed up, and then suddenly there is a notation in the reports in my account that says that the equipment is NOT ours... (Yes, in all caps). That’s right; the company president had stated during our lengthy telephone conversation that they would exchange their T-1 equipment for our wireless equipment. Now suddenly, as soon as they get their hands on the wireless equipment, they suddenly have decided that they own both sets of equipment.
I'm not sure about the details here, they keep telling me that it never belongs to a premise customer, but since after three years I still haven't gotten a copy of the contract that I signed and I don't recall any such terminology, I don't know if this applies to me or not. I was led to believe that the cost of the equipment was covered in my payments over the three year contract, and that I was told at the time that the equipment was mine at the end of my three year contract... I could be wrong, and if they would produce the contract that I have requested for over three years, I guess we would all know for sure one way or the other...
The childish antics of the owner didn’t stop their though. After telling me that I would need to find a new internet provider, I made the call to get my telephone service changed back to Verizon. To make the call I had to borrow a cell phone because as I mentioned earlier, I was still not able to make toll free telephone calls with their VOIP service after waiting a full month for M-33 Access to fix the problem as they had told me that they would do. On top of that, I now have to pay the full original installation fee for new telephone service in order to go back to Verizon. I wish someone had bothered to mention this to me in advance as well.
When I asked Verizon about changing my service back though, they told me that they needed to request permission from M33Access to change my number back to their service, and that it might take a couple of weeks to change it back. After a couple of days, my telephone went dead. M33Access disconnected my service with no warning and refused to release my telephone number to Verizon. They told Verizon that the only way I could have my number back was to go back to them as a customer! They had already told me that they did not wish to do business with me because they were tired of hearing everybody complaining about their service, so obviously it is just another temper tantrum by the owner of M33Access.
It really isn’t a problem for me since I have been overwhelmed with telemarketers anyway so maybe a new telephone number is a good thing, but in the mean time, I will be without telephone service for a week until Verizon can send a technician out to put their equipment back in place to restore service. It is obvious that the owner of M33Access cannot stand to admit when he is wrong, nor does he like it when he doesn’t get his own way. He may be able to bully some people into giving in to whatever he wants, but I am not easily coerced. I don’t like bullies, and will not give in to his tantrums.
I am not impressed however, by the fact that my son has medical problems and often has to call home during the school day, but thanks to M33Access, he was not able to do so.
I would never consider going back to using their “service” nor would I recommend them to anyone else. There are other options available which are no worse than you will get from M33Access. At least with the other options, I doubt that we will have half of the problems that we have had with M33Access.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): varies
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Epinions.com ID:
kelly60
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Member: Kelly
Location: Northern Michigan, USA
Reviews written: 364
Trusted by: 248 members
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