Washington Broadband has always been proud that when we tell you what you are buying, that’s what you get. For instance a DSL line from CenturyLink or Ziply promises 20-40mbps but you are lucky to get 6-10mbps. The reason is that old Copper phone lines cannot carry enough energy, and have inline traps to maintain the phone system, so they can’t push the speeds. That is capacity issues, we ALWAYS encourage our customers to call if they aren’t getting the speeds we promise, we are very good at fixing those issues.

Then there is the other kind of small print, we were just looking at a Spectrum Mobile ad, in big letters it says UNLIMITED use, but right below it (and it took a magnifying glass to see it) they say “Must have Spectrum Internet”, ok so they are making the money on the Internet, and using mobile (which is leased through Verizon) as a lost leader. The next part is the real trick “At 20 Gigabits of usage service will be slowed”. Ahhhh now they sound more like buying Satellite Internet, so it’s NOT really UNLIMITED if it’s slowed down is it? So how much is 20 Gigabits of use? We looked it up: “Watching movies or TV shows on Netflix uses about 1 GB of data per hour for each stream of standard definition video, and up to 3 GB per hour for each stream of HD video.” So 7-20 movies depending on the resolution you are watching it. Remember that’s slowing you down for the entire rest of the month.

Next time a price seems better than it really is, look past the big print UNLIMITED, and get your magnifying glass out. Discounts for a few months (which even we do from time to time), mean the price will go up. For the phone company low pricing is accompanied by a bunch of made up fees that end up costing you more than competitors. It would be nice if everyone was hometown like us, with integrity and transparency, but they aren’t.