MidAtlantic Broaband

I am blogging today after my long absence (do mostly to being away from home), in order to complain about a company that is making my business (well, military) trip one step less pleasant.

I am staying at the Sheppard Inn on Sheppard AFB. They use MidAtlantic Broadband (http://www.midatlanticbb.com/ ) as their internet provider, by placing individual (and already near-dial-up slow) DSL routers in each room.

Since I arrived on May 25th, I have been able to use my PS3 as my (admittedly limited in capability) internet machine. Last night this ceased to be the case. After calling the front desk, I was given MidAtlantic's service number (1-866-435-7548), and upon calling them, I was informed that gaming platforms are not supported, do to the bandwidth that gaming on them supposedly takes up. Let me count the serious flaws in this logic...

1) Most glaringly, many online gamers use PCs for their gaming (in addition to 1st person shooters, we have WoW, Guild Wars, Final Fantasy 11/14, and the many, many 'free to play' MMO games)

2) PCs draw additional bandwidth, in the form of being able to download lots of large files for a variety of purposes. For many people, if not most, the PC represents the greater use of bandwidth.

3) One can use PS3s and XBoxes as internet machines, for surfing the web.

4) If this was such a critical, and longstanding issue, how was I able to blindly use the PS3 for the past 3+ weeks?

MidAtlantic Broadband has failed in its customer service, and badly, both by providing such poor, limited service in the first place, and then further limiting it by denying service based on the platform you use.

And I believe that this has been deemed illegal, falling under the same regulations that denied phone companies the ability to deny their customers service if they did not use that phone company's phones.

And I am most definitely MidAtlantic Broadband's customer, however unwillingly, as my payment of my room also pays for my internet connection, or in this case, lack there of.