Hey Viaero - Your Missing the Bus
Jun 11th, 2008 by Nick
So if you’ve read my blog you notice that I harp on a local startup cellular company called Viaero quite frequently. The company does quite a bit right, they have towers all over, customer service isn’t too bad and they employee a lot of local people to work in their stores. However, they have quite rapidly outgrown themselves. Customer service is not nearly as good now as it was two years ago, while my local store is good some of the sales associates in other stores are horrible. I have had countless issues with the store in Scottsbluff, NE, stopping in with issues and before I can finish being told that there are no issues and it must just be my phone and that I need to call customer service. What’s the point of having all of those stores if I need to call in. And it gets better, on countless occasions I have called customer service to be told to go to the store…and then the store tells me to call customer service!
Recently I got a blackberry curve, I love it, it does almost everything I want. The one thing that it will NOT do is teathered modem. I sent an email in to Viaero and had a customer service agent get back with me, they advised that they would see if there were were plans to offer teathered modem services. After a month of waiting I finally got a reply(right after complaining on my blog about not having heard anything). I was advised that Viaero has NO plans to offer teathered modem support on the blackberry but that they would were working to offer this on other phones. Let’s think about this, the customer who has a blackberry obviously needs to be in contact quite a bit more than your regular cell phone cusotmer and would more than likely utilize teathered modem more than a regular celll phone customer. Not having teathered modem support on the blackberry is completely stupid!
It’s okay though, I found sharkmodem for my blackberry, I ran a few different tests with sharkmodem versus my vEDGE card that I pay WAY too much for considering the crappy speeds/service that I have. With sharkmodem I had BETTER speeds than on the vEDGE even when running the crappy caching software that Viaero has you install. Therefore, I’m canceling my vEDGE card and I’ll just buy the sharkmodem software, Viaero can stuff it where the sun doesn’t shine. I just my hopes up that AT&T or another large carrier that gets it (please not sprint though), one that realizes that your blackberry users are going to pay for additional services to have mobility options more so than the customer who has the shitty free Nokia phone. I already pay you $40 a month for blackberry service, another $10-20 for teathered modem would have been great. However, that being said, the sharkmodem software doesn’t cost much, it’s a one time fee and so instead of Viaero getting additional recurring revenue they don’t….bad decision on their part!
I’m sure Viaero has noticed my posts google for viaero blackberry and my blog comes up even before they do…..I’d be more than happy to set the record straight if they would just get a clue! You know how to contact me Viaero 
Nick C
What kind of speeds did you get when you had the data card? I’m looking for an alternative should the Alltel/Verizon merger go through, and they may be the best bet around Central Nebraska in areas without true broadband.
Thanks in advance.
I actually still have the data card, sharkmodem is good but it won’t tunnel remote desktop or ssh. My card speeds were horrible at first, 56k to 128k, run the Venturi client and it helps the speeds(not really because it just caches files but you think it’s faster). I called Viaero one day and they magically did nothing and the speeds on my card doubled and now I get right around 200k to ~270k. Viaero tells me that if I weren’t mobile when I use it(sitting in the passenger seat of the car) that my speeds would probably be better. I get what they are saying but the service is meant for mobile use so???