I wouldn’t wish Windstream on my worst enemy!
Never dealt with them on a consumer level, but their business class service sucks. A few years before I started working where I presently work, my predecessor replaced the unreliable and slow Windstream T1 with fiber from Time Warner Cable, but still used Windstream for voice. This past year when the 3 year contract ended we switched our dial tone from them to Time Warner PRI over fiber. Windstream was nothing short of a nightmare to deal with. Frequent, and I mean frequent as in a few times every few weeks we had trouble dialing internationally, for almost a week we couldn’t call any number in the 616 area code (Grand Rapids), we couldn’t call Canada for a day or two every so often, hell there was a point we had issues calling 150 miles down the road in Syracuse. Their tech support was next to useless, and would just say ‘we’ll submit a trouble ticket’ and a few days later the problem would be solved for a while with no real explanation as to what the problem was, but sure enough a week later there was a new problem.
It’s just my boss and me in the IT department, and I have more pressing matters to attend to then dealing with the shotty reliability of our voice provider. Small world, the sales manager at my previous job got a position with Windstream as a territory manager when he found out where I worked and what I did and practically begged me to give them another chance for data, and nearly cried when I told him that we were going to dump their voice service as well. I think he felt like I betrayed him. I had it timed perfectly, it’s was 45 day lead time for TW Voice, the contract with TWC was signed exactly 45 days before the end of the Windstream contract expired.
And it ended on a sour note. Windstream refused to release our toll free numbers to Time Warner for a few days after the cutover. It took many calls to solve what they called a ‘glitch’. And one of the DIDs that we were paying for with Windstream, that was no longer actively used by my company, could not be ported over to TWC because they as in Windstream assigned it to a business around the corner from us. I reached out to three different people asking them how that was possible and if it’s their standard business practice to assign an existing phone number to another customer without notification or consent of the original owner and change two business for the same phone number. Never got an answer.
Good riddance to those swine!
