Vyve Broadband — Local services in Sandpoint

FINAL UPDATE: Internet issues were fixed as of this last Thursday or Friday. A technician just called me to advise on the repairs and confirm if we stopped having issues. I was happy to inform him that we have. While it took a bit longer to get this resolved than I would have liked, I'm very impressed with the follow through by the Northland team. Thank you for your work to get our internet service back to normal levels.

RECENT UPDATE: Finally received a callback from Northland Support. Technician was very nice. He was able to confirm that a maintenance ticket was actually completed on July 9th for the local switch mentioned below. Unfortunately, whatever work was done made our internet even worse, not better. A new order has been opened on my account with a request for a field supervisor to approve an additional maintenance order to address my issue. Hope to have better news soon.

ORIGINAL I've been a Northland Communications customer since I moved up here in October 2013. Service had been great until the last month. With more and more frequency as of late, our internet has gone completely down for hours at a time, with a reset of the modem & router unit offering no relief. A technician came out to our house over 2 weeks ago on July 6th and confirmed nothing was wrong at our house, but rather a main switch in the neighborhood was the issue and that is was not operating at minimum standards. He advised that he could not give me a timeline, but that in the next couple of weeks a technician would be out to repair the nearby switch. I asked for a notification when this happened, but he said they couldn't provide one. He said to just keep an eye out for a Northland truck with a crane working at one of the powerline junctions. Since then our internet has gotten worse. Our internet was down all afternoon yesterday and came up for only a brief moment around 10 pm. It then went back down again. It was up for a few minutes this morning and is now down yet again. I'm writing this review while connected to the WiFi Hotspot on my mobile phone. I've tried calling Northland support 3 times over the past 48 hours and have sat on hold for 20+ minutes, before pressing option 1 to receive a callback when an agent is available. I've had no callbacks. Suffice to say, Northland is turning me into a very unhappy customer. Not only will I be asking for significant credit to my account (especially considering my rates recently increased), but also will be strongly considering a move to Ting or Frontier if this matter is not...

In Sandpoint they are a small staff serving a fairly large community if you take into consideration how many people they have at the local office and how many people they are serving. The biggest problem they have is trying to get approval to get anything done from the head office before things break. The local staff is great to work with and will help out as much as they can. Sometimes they are extremely busy and have a really hard time getting to all the customers in time but this is because they are constantly going back and putting band aids back on some of the copper infrastructure. It's hard to maintain a system that needs to be overhauled and take care of customers at the same time, but they manage to do it and do it quite well considering the man power available. Some of this infrastructure has fortunately been upgraded and has fixed many of the problems that they used to have but the branches off the fiber are still mostly copper and is effected by things like temperature, humidity and how many modems/cable boxes are connected (load). Hopefully one day corporate will bite the bullet and start upgrading to fiber because if they don't they will be the little guy around town as Frontier is already starting to drop fiber down town and creating redundant loops from Sandpoint to Spokane. Bottom line is the local folks try and help as much as they can but are extremely busy for multiple reasons out of there control because Corporate holds the reins pretty tight and will only upgrade the infrastructure when their client base is being threatened or when someone else is willing to pay the bill. For instance, the new Arris modems are crap, they aren't capable of the speeds available on the network but NCTV uses them because they are cheap. The Motorola Surfboard modems are good modems but now are hard to get from the local shop because Corporate wanted to save some money at the expense of their customers. I can understand saving money but when your Techs tell you that the equipment is crap it's...

It's the cheapest, most reliable service in the area — but that's not saying much. Sandpoint is still in 2005 with their internet service. I constantly have to reset my router and have had 5 or 6 routers in a five year period due to that being the only type of service they provide when they come check out issues. The service is spotty as hell and I rarely get the 24 Mbps I am paying for. In fact, over the past couple months I have been doing speed tests twice per week and I am averaging just 15 Mbps. Not bad, but at $85 per month it's abysmal. I've given up and just upped my Verizon data plan to supplement when Northland inevitably takes a dump multiple times each week.

Update: A few months ago they finally stepped up and decided to address the problems I've been complaining about for the past four years by replacing all the lines from the street to my place. In that time I was only left internet-less for two weeks. This seemed to help out with connectivity, however, the speed... still getting only about 12-18 while paying for 24. And then it happened. We just had first snow a few days ago and now my service is dogshit again. Honestly, if you're able to, do yourself a favor and skip Northland. The problems are obviously not in the routers and they're not in the lines from the street level. The issues are systemic and will only frustrate you while draining your bank account due to their overpriced service.

Oh, and I can't really speak to the quality of service locally since they have no office phone number and instead route you directly to their corporate call center.

I have attached two photos. One is from 4:17pm (0.67Mbps DL, 0 UL), the other is from 18 minutes later at 4:39pm (20.2Mbps DL, 1.43Mbps UL). I called Northland after attempting to conduct the first speed test and was still not connected to a customer service agent by the time my connection was restored.

Can't wait for Ting to make it...