Why do I say to take heart WiMax guys? Today I have some musings on the process of switching to VoIP or why my current broadband service provider is driving me crazy. My question is why do service providers make it so hard to do business with them? Don't they understand how to encourage customers to spend more? Today I am so desperately wishing for some WiMax service at my office. Or even DSL which is also not available. My cable provider (who will remain nameless) has been offering a 3 Meg down and 256K upload pipe for some time. Just recently they launched a VoIP service all their own. I have a friend who is using it and it works fine she says. Well, they sent out a new price bundling package informing me that they were raising my price but that they had a bundle package with a bit more TV service including voice for about $5 more. What is more they apparently have a new 5 Meg down and 512K up that really caught my eye. Especially if I were to switch to VoIP that would help and help a lot. The incremental price as listed on the right was only about $7 different. What a deal I thought. Now of course, the downside is I have a business phone line and nobody will LNP those numbers. I would have to inform all of you of a number change. No fun at all with that. Still, the savings would be substantial. So could I also upgrade to the 5 Meg service. Yes, but only for (depending on who I talked to) $25 to $40 extra per month. What I said? Your flyer says it is $7 difference. Well there is no package with the 5 Meg in it so that is that. Somewhere in here one of the people then told me that NO the VoIP wasn't available in my area after all. I think they just wanted me off the phone. I did ask if I could switch to a business account so I could pay for whatever I did get out of my company account. Yes I was told but only for a higher price. Cool I said, what extra service am I getting? Why none of course (like I was a fool to ask), you are a business so you would get charged more. Now having sold B2B broadband I can tell you that no customer, business or otherwise wants to hear that. They didn't even make an attempt to package some class of business service (with extra emails or hosting or spam filtering or something that costs virtually nothing) to justify a much higher price. They were just going to abuse me because they could I suppose. Well, currently I am thinking of just cancelling all of the TV, buying JUST the 5 Meg pipe and switching to Direct TV. Then I could add Vonage or some other VoIP provider for cheap, take my sweet time getting my new number to everybody and then cancel my landline phones. So I would go from planning to buy more to spending less. Good job service provider. Take heart WiMax service providers for your competiton is clumsy, not bright, provides poor service and they ARE giving you openings. TAKE THEM. Tim Sanders, tim@thefinalmile.net www.thefinalmile.net www.wimaxglobalnews.com