Clearwire

The approach that I’m going to take with rating the telecom/​internet/​cable industry is going to be from the ground up. As an industry, they just seem to not really like their customers. All of these companies start at one star and work their way up from there.
From the beginning of the business relationship, you are typically given the bait-​and-​switch — you know, you get your 1 year intro rate, then prices begin to rise significantly. Since that is the standard, a person shopping for internet/​phone/​cable service then knows that they need to find two prices to do comparison shopping: the intro rate, and the standard rate. The intro rate is easy to find, but you need to be Sherlock Holmes sometimes to find the standard rate — it’s exhausting and annoying!
Then, to get answers you typically have to go through a call center — yay! Some of these call centers are overseas, and some are in the US. Either way, they are time consuming to have to deal with.
Okay, now you’re signed into a contract with one of these companies. Well, the service usually rolls without a hitch, but let me relate an experience that I had with Clearwire/​Sprint: the service was getting bad and I was experiencing outages. When I’d call for support, they’d hand me to online tech support that seems to work off a queue card and the typical problem that they’d lead you on to would be that if you were using your own router then according to them the problem was the third party router — this was the problem every time! I’d eventually have to suggest that they needed to reset my connection on their switch to resolve the issue — fixed the problem every time. One time the problem was bad and was not getting resolved no matter what they did. We kept going back and forth for a few weeks until my problem was finally escalated to someone that could check the coverage area — it turns out that Sprint/​Clearwire was pulling out of my market area and failed to tell me!
These companies are so annoying to deal with and not one of them seems to want to break the mold.
So here we go for this company…
Just dropping this on Clearwire/​Sprint (whoever owns it now), since they are the initial source of my disgust with the ISP industry.