Bertram WIreless

That didn't go too well. The service was very inconsistent and very slow. When I would call for their customer service, they would ask me odd crazy questions. They never credit you for when you are down. So another service provider came out and I went to cancel but they said you have to give us a two months written notice. You have to send them either a fax or a mail letter thing and give them reason why you are cancelling. They said they have to take one or two months to cancel your service. Sometimes they would not call back and a lot of times, they will say, "We will get back within..."and I would go days without hearing a reply from them. They were very unreliable on getting back with you on anything, usually you had to call them back.

I first contacted Bertram/Granite Wireless back in August of 2011 when my family was looking at homes in the Hartland/Hartford area. As we looked at various for-sale homes in the area I would contact Bertram and request they do a service availability check on the homes/properties we intended to make formal offers to purchase on. I probably had them check on three or four homes including the one we eventually bought and moved to. The techs I initially dealt with during the pre-customer period were all very helpful, courteous, etc? For those in rural areas like the area we live in,high-speed Internet can be hard to come by. You?re too far out for Cable and often too far out for phone-based high speed like UVerse/FiOS/DSL. That leaves: Satellite, which has horrible latency and bandwidth limits; 4G, which has great speeds and latency, but even worse data limits than satellite; and finally (if you?re lucky) ?Canopy Wireless? which promises DSL-like performance, only wireless? as long as you have line-of-sight to their tower. The reason I chose Bertram was because at the time, Bertram seemed to be the most capable Wireless Internet provider in the area, claiming 4-6Mb sustained speeds. The other major provider in the area had ?burst? speeds at or near Bertram?s speeds, but would drop off to much lower ?sustained? speeds after a specified amount of data transferred. The first red flag popped up when the installer came out. The first modem/receiver he installed didn?t work so he had to install a used modem. At the end of his installation he happily proclaimed I was up and running and the equipment should be able to hit 6Mb/s but I would be starting out at 2.5. Bertram?s service worked great for the first couple of months. It wasn?t quite like using Cable/UVerse, but we could do some online gaming, could stream NetFlix (with some pausing and rebuffering), life was good. In fact I referred two of my neighbors to them. Then the problems started. As time went on I started noticing that as the day wore on, the speeds I would receive would gradually drop off. Instead of 2Mb I would only be able to get .7Mb or less. By 8PM, our internet was all but unusable it was so slow. We could no longer stream Netflix, couldn?t play online games, even ordinary web browsing seemed to be impacted. Unfortunately Bertram?s technical support hours were very limited (8PMat the latest). They have since gone to 24-hour technical support. So, the next morning I would call Bertram?s support line, they would do some quick testing and proclaim everything was fine. I?d get on the Internet and sure enough, everything was back up to the advertised speeds. But then afternoon/evening would come around and the same problem would occur. For the next few months I played one-way ?phone tag? with Bertram?s support technicians. I would call up, tell them I had had problems the previous night, hear the usual ?well everything seems to be fine now, call us back when you have problems again?. Finally I pointed to the number of times I had called in about the issue and finally one of the techs claimed they would escalate it and would get back to me. But no one ever got back to me. After all, they didn?t say WHEN they would get back to me. So, after a few days went by, I called in to ask if my issue had been looked into. ?No, but I will call you back as soon as we have a resolution.? So I called back a couple of weeks later, irate because no one had called me back. I was promptly told the issue had been corrected. True to their word for the next couple of weeks the service worked fine. Then a new problem started. Once again the speed would degrade as the day went on into the evening, dropping down below 1Mb. Now however, the connection would go out altogether. Frequently once the connection went down, it was down for the rest of the night until the doors opened at Bertram the next day. Then as if they flipped a switch it would come back up and everything would be normal. So, once again I began multiple calls to their support center. This time I made a simple request. Please send someone out to look at the equipment. It literally took MONTHS before they gave in and sent a technician out. The technician found (or claimed) that the antenna?s alignment was off a bit and that may have caused the problems I was receiving. We were back up and running for about a week before the problems resumed. We had had the service for almost a year at this point (half-way through the contract). Over the next few weeks I called multiple times again. Finally another, more senior tech was sent out who claimed that the signal was being interrupted by 2 trees a couple of miles away which apparently had been ignored by both the installation tech and the previous tech. The explanation sounded reasonable so I accepted it. He then went on to say the only way to fix it was to install a taller antenna which would see over the two pesky trees. The tech admitted this was only a temporary solution, and that after a few years the trees would grow and interrupt the signal once again. At that point he said I would either have to drop down to a much lower tier of service (lower than 1Mb) which was more tolerant to ?trees in the way? or have a full 60? tower put up to raise the antenna even further. At the time the $150 they wanted to raise the antenna a bit higher seemed to make sense. It would give us a couple of years to save up money for the $1500 tower we would need to have built to maintain our speeds and service or hopefully a better internet solution would be available. Little did I know that those pesky trees were to go through a 20 foot growth spurt in the span of a month. Because one month later we were back to the same old problems. I was kidding about the trees going through a growth spurt, they hadn?t grown at all. Furthermore, the tech was never able to explain why those trees were only in the way at night, but were mysteriously out of the way during the day when I would see normal speeds. The simple fact is that the trees were never the problem. The problem was that Bertram was trying to cram too many customers onto their system. There is absolutely no other explanation for why we would be problem-free during low usage periods (during the typical 9-5 work day) but on nights and weekends we were unable to maintain a connection, and when we did, the speeds were a fraction of what they should have been. Finally, in April of 2013 I had had enough. I had once again tried to get Bertram to deal with the problems we were having with outages and slow speeds. I was finally told by one of their techs that there was simply nothing more they could do for me. They had basically sold me the promise of a service they couldn?t attain and that if I wanted a reliable connection (albeit slower) I would have to drop down to their 900MHz service. Or I?d have to give them $1500 for a 60? tower. When I asked if that was guaranteed to correct my issue or my money back, they said ?no.? So, I started the cancellation process and went to a different provider in the area. Over the near two years I was with them, they ?dropped the ball? on countless occasions. Not only that, my neighbors were also complaining of the same sorts of problems? making me look like an idiot for referring them. I called into cancel my service at the end of April and was told that there was a minimum 30 day notification requirement. This meant that I?d have to be billed for one more month. I told them ?fine?, just drop my service down to the lowest service tier (around $30 a month) since I wouldn?t be using their service (I had already switched to a competitor). The next month I got a bill for $85 which was still the old ?Gamer? plan that I had requested a couple of months earlier hoping that might help the speed? it didn?t and they also didn?t change my service tier as requested. I received a customer retention e-mail from one of Bertram?s employees begging me to stay a customer. When I tried to respond, I found that the reply-to address was a non-deliverable e-mail box. So I sent a complaint letter to their support e-mail (which I had used numerous times over the past year and a half). A customer service rep e-mailed back and apologized for all of the problems I had experienced. She said they would send someone out to retrieve their equipment and correct the billing mistakes. As if all of that wasn?t enough, two months later I received a bill for over $500 because *I* had not returned the equipment I had been told they would retrieve on their own. Furthermore they never processed the cancellation and were still billing me. I called in to their billing department to get the situation straightened out and encountered even more incompetence, stubbornness, and apathy. When I talked to their representative they insisted I would have to pay $52 for the removal of their equipment. I explained their billing error and suggested that a reasonable solution would be to either refund the $53 they overbilled me, or for them to simply pay for the removal (their representative never disclosed that there would be a fee associated with the removal). They flat out refused. I was told that not only would they NOT correct the billing mistake in May, but if I persisted in my insistence that they pay for the removal of their equipment they would charge me for the remainder of the contract (even though they had been unable to honor their end of it) along with the unreturned equipment. They said they would also go after me because they believed I had been undercharged over the past 18 months. And, if I refused to pay those cooked-up charges they?d send the account to collections and ruin my credit rating. How?s that for customer service?

terrible