So, here I sit. The wife and I thought it waould be fun to get away for a few days, and spend it in the shadow of Mt Baker. We’re staying at a very nice RV campground in the Grizz. It’s been a beautiful day, and we had a great dinner at the diner down the road. Roasted hotdogs tomorrow night, though.
As we migrated back to the RV, we both jump on our laptops to check up on email and whatnot, do a little light web surfing, nothing to major. No streaming or game playing or anything like that.
But, no. No such luck.
The campground no longer has free wifi, having partnered up with an outfit calle Jabba Communications. They now charge $5.95 per day for 5mbps “broadband”. Well, it ain’t so broad. Let me back up a little though.
We both paid $14.95 each for a week of broadband, which is cheaper than just purchasing three days worth. Fine no problem. Thirty dollars down the black hole. As long as it works, it’s alright.
Getting connected is a trial. First, you need to make an account, if you can get connected to their captive portal. Finally connected after about 15 minutes. I put in my information, and wait another 15 minutes. When I finally get connected, I’ve got dialup speeds. Just to be safe, I removed all virtual switches and other networking trickery from my machine, rebooted, no dice. Another 20 minutes of fiddling around, and I can finally get connected. It takes 6 minutes to load gMail.
Enough of this.
I kill the connection to their “service”, which is up and down at this point, and turn on the hotspot on my phone. Instant 120mbps goodness. I can’t connect to their website, on their connection, but on my phone, no problem.
I’ve now been waiting on hold for 25 minutes to get my money back. I’m not holding out any hope that someone will answer my call. Since I’ve been waiting on hold, I took the opportunity to check out some of their online reviews and complaints. Almost all of their Yelp reviews are one star. A quick look at BBB shows many complaints.
An interesting thing that I noticed on their Yelp reviews, and it appears to be a pattern, is that people will pay for their service, not et the service, eventually get ahold of someone (sometimes 2-3 days), and get told it takes six weeks for the money to come back. Seems to me they can take your money in seconds, but giving it back for failing to render services for cash paid is not in their toolbox.
Stay far away from Jabba Communications. You’ll find them in RV Parks, Marinas, Hospitality companies (hotels and such), student housing, and various dealerships.
By the way, I’ve been writing this as I wait on hold. They just hung up on me after 40 minutes, without answering.
This screen capture shows the loss from my local machine to the gateway (on the left), and the loss from my machine through the gateway to Google DNS.