The NetZero Experiment: Final Result= Failure

Ok. About a month ago I saw an ad for Netzero Broadband DSL for 10 bucks a month. Being a cheapo, and recently relying on Verizon Broadband only for access, I thought I'd conduct a cheap-geek experiment. So I signed up, secure in the 30 day money back pitch.

Yeah. I know. But I did promise to report on it. So here goes...

If you are a total geek like me, you can get this service to work. I did, but only for a few minutes at a time. The modem they sent me was incredibly old and out-dated. I had to go find drivers for all my computers, because the drivers that auto-install are XP and earlier. The drivers I found for later versions of Windows had to be manually installed, and were very hard to find. I also found TONS of forum posts and consumer complaints about Netzero, their modems, and customer support being abusive. Q'elle surprise!

THEN I had to set the modem to ping itself automatically to work. It did... but the service was still painfully slow. This was kind of what I wanted to discover... was it worth 10 bucks a month or would it be so crappy it wasn't even worth 10 bucks a month? They never did provide any answer other than "it must be your computer." After two days of fixing their problems, and getting insanely difficult responses, (don't hate me, but I could barely understand them anyway), I figured I'd just cancel it and move on.

Ultimately, I invoked my 30 money back guarantee... only they ignored this, and charged me a second month, which I only today discovered. Then they said "you didn't cancel in 30 days, so will be charged a fee for cancellation."

Really? Ok, go with that, because I'm both bloody minded and smarter than you...

Cut to: my attorney general filing a small claims charge, and my bank telling me not to worry about it, they have my back. BTW-- on the flip side? Rockland Trust is the bomb. Just sayin'.

You loose, I win, and now I've warned others. LOL It's actually unfortunate... slow DSL for 10 bucks a month might have actually appealed to people on a very tight budget. I mean, it's as cheap as the coffee you'd have to buy to get free wifi in a cafe, right? But it has to work and the company has to be fair and honest... two failures here. Shame.