Call me whatever you like, I will always get angry at businesses that don’t care about their customers. I work really hard for the little money I have and spend it carefully it makes me mad when a company takes that for granted.
I purchased a Wilson Sleek cell booster and high gain antenna after doing a lot of research and getting opinions from people. Nowhere was there any mention that you need an adapter to couple these two devices. The antenna even says “Works on all cellular devices” with no mention of the adapter.
The only way to know that you need an adapter is to understand that FME female and SMA female connectors are incompatible. It’s not my job to know that or even to research it. The products are Wilson’s and it’s their job to make purchase easy for their customers by providing compatible products or at least making a note that X is not compatible with Y without Z. I have found several reviews of the Sleek and the coupler chastising Wilson for this same issue.
I have now been waiting 11 days for my damn coupler to come and it likely won’t be here for another week.
I don’t want to count how much money I have lost in that time because I am barely able to get online. I spent $190 on this device, which seriously ate into my gas budget, so going up the hill three or four times a day is no longer an option.
Yes, I can get online a little at home, after pages hang and hang and hang and connections time out. What is infuriating me (and I don’t use the word lightly) is that I get 1 bar at the top of the hill with the Mifi only and can download a 330MB file in five minutes flat. Down here, with the Sleek giving me 2 to 3 bars, it would take three hours to download that same file, if the connection didn’t keep timing out. I’d give photographic evidence of this, but I can’t upload pictures tonight. In fact, I never know what I will and won’t be able to do at any given time.
Just a half hour ago, Netflix was streaming nicely and pages were loading and now I know that if I don’t manually save this post to a text file, I will lose it because the connection will time out as I press save. I know this for a fact because this is what happened last night when I wrote the bulk of this post and then set it aside until I’d had some time to cool off. You don’t want to read what I had to say last night.
In other words, don’t buy all the testimonials that rave about how many extra bars the Sleek will give you. Bars means squat! I would have been so much better off putting that $190 into Miranda’s gas tank and making an arrangement with a farmer up the hill to park in his field for a month.
Now, I’m hopeful that the Sleek will work better with the high gain antenna, but what if it doesn’t? I’ll have lost almost a month and wasted $190 because Wilson Electronics is too lazy to put on their literature that you need a $6 coupler to marry their products.
But what angers me the most is that I wrote a polite email to Wilson last week about this issue and got an autoresponder telling me a human would answer me in two business days. More than two business days later, nothing. Not even a canned insincere ‘sorry, we’ll try to do better.’ Having no serious competition is no excuse to treat your customers like they don’t count.
Wilson Electronics, you suck.
I admit I’m surprised at your anger at Wilson. Wilson has no idea what two components you plan on connecting together. There are many different antennas, and many different devices to connect them to. Wilson manufactures a number of different antennas and boosters, but even so, you may choose to use another manufacturer’s antenna with one of their boosters, or one of Wilson’s antennas with a different brand booster, or with a cell phone or modem, etc., all made by other manufacturers and each of which has a different type of connecting port. I have two different setups to boost my internet connection, one in my house and one in my RV, both of which need a number of connectors for all the components, and I never thought to fault Wilson or any of the manufacturers for not holding my hand through selecting all the connectors I needed. I even got it wrong and had to send one back and order the correct one, but it was my fault for not choosing the right one first time around.
Now your frustration and anger with trying to work when your livelihood depends on a good internet connection I understand completely! My sincerest best wishes in quickly getting things straightened out and up and running for a fast and reliable connection! To give you some hope, once you have all the right components set up and things are humming away, you’ll be blessing Wilson for making such wonderful devices! 🙂
In other words, don’t buy all the testimonials that rave about how many extra bars the Sleek will give you. Bars means squat!
You have that exactly correct. Every place that I have ever been I get 4 Bars from Verizon IF I get a connection. I will get different numbers of Bars from WIFI connections but IF connected to Verizon it is always 4 Bars. Doesn’t mean a thing when it comes to transmission speeds.
My anger comes from the fact that dozens of other people have been caught in the same situation as me and told Wilson and Wilson still doesn’t care. The little book that comes with the Sleek even mentions my antenna as being compatible without mentioning the adapter!!!
You try being four hours away from civilization stuck on incredibly slow internet and even slower mail with the two pieces of technology you need to get up to speed only to discover that you’re still missing a piece.
As a point of comparison, take Apple and my current adventure of trying to hook up my Mac to a TV. I went to the Apple site and they say, yes, the Mac is compatible with the TV. But you’re going to need an adapter to hook up to the HDMI cable and if you Mac is this old, you’ll also need an audio cable. Here are some manufacturers who have these adapters. If Apple can do that, Wilson electronics should too.
Money is really tight right now and I did put my gas money into buying the booster and now I’m stuck here unable to earn a living and freaking out about how little I’ve made in the last two weeks because Wilson doesn’t care about their customers as evidenced by the fact that they won’t go the extra step for them, as, for example, Apple does.
After I read many testimonials, we went with Powerful Signal and have been very happy with that. Everyone we had talked to did not recommend the Wilson. You might want to check out the blog “Technomadia” Maybe they can offer some solutions to your situation.
We were able to have the finances to install satelllite internet but I realize that this is way beyond your finances. It has truly been wonderful. Only one time did we not have the internet as there was a mountain in the way.
It is so much easier in the US to get coverage and so difficult up here in Canada. Totally understand your frustration.
I have NO complaints about internet coverage in Canada. We’re building cell towers like crazy. I happen to be in a valley and out the line of site for the local towers. Bell knows about this now and put the valley on the list for a tower. It’ll take a while of course, but there will be coverage out here without a booster in a few years. This is only the third place I’ve been to since I got mobile Canadian internet that I don’t have coverage and that’s not even really true since I have coverage with a booster.
In the US, I have had trouble getting decent service in more remote areas, like North Dakota, and heavily populated areas like San Antonio. Really, there is no point comparing the US and CDN cellular networks anymore as they are right on par with each other.
I would not want satellite internet. Very slow connections, very expensive, very limited bandwidth, very heavy set up. Yuck. Cellular is the way to go.
There were a lot of screw ups with my booster order and everyone but Wilson worked to make it better for me. I called Future Shop about needing the adapter and they credited me for shipping on the entire order. I emailed Amazon and they credited me for shipping on the adapter since it’s late. I called DHL and they were very apologetic about how long it’s taking and advised me that Amazon took five days to get the package to them.
So that takes me back to Wilson who can’t even answer a simple email with a form letter.
I’m reasonably happy with a competing product from Maximum Signal. They did mention the need for adaptor cable to hook to my cell modem.
Dang, I wish I’d known about Maximum Signal before. 🙁