After a hiatus of nearly a year, we finally got internet at home again. We got it mostly as an incentive for our renters downstairs, but it is definitely a plus for us as well. On the recommendation of a friend, we chose to use Provo’s iProvo system and one of iProvo’s two available vendors—MstarMetro.
While I can’t say much nice about MstarMetro’s customer service (I have never been on hold for less than 20 minutes), I will say that their technicians know their stuff. I have always been able to find the answers to my questions. Of course, I shouldn’t have needed to ask the question half the time (like when they installed the TV and didn’t tell us the passwords to access anything), but I guess I can forgive that.
However, our router is a piece of junk. I purchased the brand and model of router on the recommendation of MstarMetro, and so I was highly disgruntled when it started dying randomly on me. Specifically, the router refused to work with my IP Address. I could normally go in and fix it manually each time, but honestly…. I didn’t sign up for internet so I could spend the first 15 minutes of each session resetting my wireless connection. And it was a real burden on our tenants downstairs as well.
The thing that was really annoying, however, was the fact that when I called MstarMetro for support on the router, the technician told me that this particular router had a failure rate of 80%!!! So, the router that MstarMetro recommends is the same router that fails 80% of the time.
Makes me wonder why I’m paying $40 a month for internet.
Hmmm. Interesting.
What kind of router is it?
I didn’t want to post the router brand because I wasn’t quite convinced it was their fault. As it turns out, I was right. The router we use is a Linksys WRTG54 router. The brand has had numerous problems with IP Addresses, but the latest patches to their firmware should have solved those.
[...] MSTAR Metro Courtney and I have used MSTAR as our internet provider since December. After a month of horror stories, we finally got everything working in spite of MSTAR’s repeated attempts at helping us (click here). [...]