FAQ | You get what you pay for!

How can I get help or support?

It depends, do you mean with some sort of behavioral problem or grocery shopping? We have problems of our own so can’t help you with any of those things.

If you mean support with your service, um, try posting on our Facebook page or Twitter and we’ll be happy to help you, somehow, in what ever way we can, if we can. We avoid email here so probably best to do that. Oops, we don’t have any Facebook or Twitter pages.

Don’t expect too much though. We’ll usually just apologize and ask you to direct message us your account and address. After we put on a good show for anyone looking at your post to see, you’ll go back to suffering the same problems you had before, er, with our service or that attitude problem. Maybe you need anger management?

You’ll probably be even more frustrated and angry after you get your support from us. Sorry.

Now, if you’re one of those people that likes to figure things out on your own or you just want to know how your service is doing, with us or with your current Internet provider, there’s www.outages.io. The reports show it all, no matter where or with whom the problems are, you’ll always know.

Armed with that, maybe you can get help. We have a hard time dismissing problems when multiples of our customers post their Outages.io reports on our social pages so we’d love to pass that fun on to other providers.

Of course we do tell our customers that we don’t acknowledge those NutPile reports otherwise Sam, our network guy would be working twenty four hours a day if we offered reliable services.

What's the difference for business service in a residential area?

Well, primarily, we make more money for the same service your neighbor has. We love this part.
We also make promises to get repairs done faster and sometimes say that we’ll even prioritize your data over your neighbors.

We learned about this money making opportunity before starting Super Slow Internet when we decided to buy a ‘business’ service for our house.

The fact is, it’s not like we’re running different cables to your house, you’re using the same network as your neighbor is. If he goes down, you’ll go down too but we’ll promise to get someone there soon and maybe fixed sooner.

That won’t really happen but it’s those empty promises that go a long way toward making you feel like you should pony up the extra cash for the ‘business’ service. It’s kind of an odds game, most will like it, some will have problems but if most people don’t know about the ones having problems then it won’t make a dent in our sales and income.

Works for us.

Can't you fix the intermittent problems?

Can you? If we wanted to spend money in your area, we’d do it.

Instead, it’s easier to for us to just keep telling you that we’re on it and never actually doing much about it. It’s also easier to tell you that maybe the problems are only at your house. Most people in your area don’t know about the other one having the same problems so it’s pretty easy for us to keep telling you everything is fine.

Who’s to know unless everyone gets together and even then, we’ll still deny there are problems since we’re the only game in town. Well, it’s us and the other slower service… you know the one, it’s not cable, come on, you know.

In fact, it’s an industry joke to have you reboot your PC or hold your phone above your head. We laugh until our eyes are bleeding when we hear the customer doing those things.

Maybe you have bad wiring or maybe your dog chewed something up that’s causing your connection to behave badly? How would we know? If we have to send Sam over there, he won’t be happy but we’ll be happy to charge you a service call.

In the end, the problems will keep coming back because we already know we need to upgrade out hardware in your area but ain’t doing it until enough people complain. Wait, did I just type that out loud?

I guess we’re supposed to mention that Internet consumers can use www.outages.io to find those pesky problems though. We don’t always know where the problems are, heck, sometimes they aren’t even with us but we still get the blame. With Outages.io, you’ll be able to know exactly where the problems are, at your house, with your provider or beyond.

Why can't I get the speeds I pay for?

The answer can get real technical but let’s try to dumb it down for you.

Did you sign some kind of speed guarantee with us? Nooo you didn’t did you. If you had, you would have signed a Service Level Agreement known as an SLA and you don’t get that with your standard Internet access service. An SLA based service means the Internet provider better give you what you’re paying for otherwise you can terminate the contract.

It usually also means having to give you some kind of dedicated line or circuit or something to make darn sure you get that speed. It’s a lot of work so they charge a bunch more for it and they sure don’t want to lose you as a customer from that point on so they go the extra mile to make sure you’re happy.

Super Slow Internet doesn’t bother offering those because there is usually some extra work involved and Sam the network guy hates working. We really need to find another network guy. Besides, we can barely get any speed to you so we don’t offer any kind of SLA, for anyone, ever.

To sum up, your home and so called business level service in a residential area doesn’t come with any kind of SLA. In this case, it’s heavily shared, shared and overshared and it’s called Best Effort Delivery.

Are you starting to get the big picture now? What you need to understand is that the speed we promised isn’t to the Internet, it’s to the street, maybe a little beyond. That same speed is being sold to your neighbors so if you look at it as ten people using the same hose spigot at the same time, nobody can get the full amount of water pressure.

In some neighborhoods, we have a super high speed 3Mbps connection for our customers to share those 1.8Mbps deals we offer. There’s no way we can give everyone that kind of speed but most people aren’t trying to use it at the same time which is how we get away with overselling it. You’ll notice the slow downs and the outages and other problems especially when your neighbors get home but usually, during the day, it’s cool, it works.

If you really want to know a bit more about what speed testing really is, click on the ‘Speed testing often shows good speeds’ tab and you’ll find a couple of interesting links in there.

By the way, slow speeds don’t exactly mean speed but some other issues on the circuit. The problems show up as your connection being sluggish, even if you do speed tests that show great speeds. Sam messing up a configuration on one of our routers or cables being moved around or bad and countless other things can cause lots of intermittent outages which you see as ‘slow’ speeds.

By the way, ever wonder when most of your problems happen? You know how sometimes we’ll sit around and say ‘seems like most of my problems happen around 2am when I’m on Amazon’. Wanna know exactly what the pattern is?

Again, back to our sponsor that we’re supposed to mention a lot. Check out their demo, a live Outages.io, agent that you can see in action. After logging in and being in the dashboard, click on the Advanced tab, then the Outages option. Change the Range from a week to three months for example and you’ll see something really cool. It shows you when most of your problems are happening.

Speed testing often shows good speeds?

Speed testing, hahaha. Sorry but that’s a super funny one to us.

The guys at www.outages.io did some crazy speed testing experiments and in the end, they only managed to use up a lot of bandwidth and not much else.

Then they questioned the whole idea of speed testing to begin with and why it isn’t what it seems to be. It’s more of a commercial thing than honest to goodness networking. There are too many variables to actually test accurately.

Sure, unless there is something very broken, you’ll pretty much always get fair results from these tests because they are optimized to give you good results. Again, this is unless there really is something wrong and usually, it’s not at your home but somewhere else so likely everyone in your area is experiencing the same thing.

Fun fact, if you and a good bunch of other neighbors did speed testing at the exact same time… guess what you’d get? You would all be doing nothing more than using up all your bandwidth. Read those articles, they are quite interesting.

How reliable is your Internet service?

How reliable is yours if you’re not with us already?

We’ll be happy to tell you that it’s super highly reliable, do what ever marketing it takes to get you to switch providers but in the end, you’ll still see the same problems.

Marketing is just that and while there are lots of sites out there that rate providers, it always comes down to trying something for yourself. Only problem is that once you’ve signed up, you’re toast, you can’t get out. Mind you there are some nice providers that have relaxed this and now you can get out more easily but that’s probably because they know you’ll only have one or few other choices and will probably be back anyways.

The reliability factor is mainly based on how many are actually reporting on a provider in different areas. If most people suck it up and accept the bad without complaining, then reliability kinda goes up in those areas :).

Can I PLEASE cancel my service!

Sure you can, you can cancel any time, after you’ve paid us in full.

Didn’t you read about cancelling on our site before signing up? Ending your contract with Super Slow Internet is as easy as paying off all of the months that you’re not going to use.

Even though you’ll be long gone and we won’t have to spend a dime, you’ll still owe us for the privilege of becoming a customer in the first place. Works well for us and you’ll be able to find some other provider that will promise you a reliable services that come with plenty of issues.

Is Sam really the only network guy you have?

Sam and his sweet tech support setup

Who says so?

Sam is our main network guy but there are others, lots of others. Maybe they don’t actually work for us full time and we find them on the local classifieds but yeah, there are others. Sam works cheap, lives on Doritos, soda and we keep him in a constant supply of early 90’s hardware.

What ever you do, don’t upset Sam when he visits your house. And don’t ask him why he’s carrying an armload of floppy disks with him. It makes him feel like he’s helping. And please don’t tell him you don’t know what a floppy disk is!