TDS Telecommunications review: Poor service, poorer customer service.

I recently switched from Charter/Spectrum to TDS in hopes that I would have positive experience. In the 3 months that I have been a customer there have been at least 3 outages. The current outage has lasted more than 12 hours. For remote employees this is crippling.

Then I try to obtain an update via their chat service and after waiting some 20 minutes for an agent and entering my account information no less than 3 times the agent “Fatuma” loses patience with me because of how long my response took to compose, a total of 3 minutes and they disconnected me from the chat and ended the communication.

So I try again and get through only to learn they cannot even tell me an estimated time for restoration let alone the reason for the outage.

As a 20 year veteran of building fiber networks for ISP’s if I ever gave such a lame excuse to one of my customers they would conclude business with me the next day. Nor would I ever accept that as a reasonable explanation from one of my upstream providers if it was offered.

When an upstream provider for TDS has an outage TDS receives compensation for the downtime. Do you know what end customers will receive if TDS or one of their upstream providers fails to meet their service agreement? Nothing.

I will be switching providers as soon as possible. When failures happen like this in terrestrial networks it is due to fire, negligence or catastrophic reasons and TDS should be transparent with their customers.

This isn’t a marine route in the Peugeot Sound with multiple breaks and the marine fiber crews are working night and day in stormy weather to restore service.

Perhaps TDS should look at a more robust infrastructure and a network topology that lends itself to redundancy with all of the A-CAM grants funded by American taxpayers, instead of fast tracking poor designs that are prone to failure leaving the very people that not only subscribe to their services, but also helped fund the infrastructure that they rely on for work, business, and entertainment.