I have Viasat business service with an RG1000 satellite terminal. Recently the service stopped working due to the terminal failing. The RG1000 gets warm, but no status light and no ethernet link. Tech support says that even though this is leased equipment from Viasat that failed, I need to pay a $175 technician dispatch fee to have them come replace their broken equipment. It might be understandable to pay this fee for customer-owned equipment, but this is managed equipment owned by the service provider that has an associated monthly fee.
My question is whether there is a self-service replacement option for this equipment, given that the failed equipment is the indoor modem and not the ODU. If not, is there any reason I shouldn’t just cancel service and sign up for new Viasat service (this account is no longer under contract) or HughesNet service? Or Starlink for that matter? Is there a retentions department at Viasat?
Update: connected the customer with the Viasat Business Care team and a service call was scheduled for 4/6 - will follow up after this to check in on customer’s experience.
The technician dispatch just completed at my site. Despite being clear to every person I’ve interacted with that the modem is dead and will not power on, the technician arrived with no replacement modem and couldn’t do anything other than agree that the modem needs to be replaced. What are my next steps?
I spoke with the business support call center just now and scheduled another tech visit for 4/12 to try again to replace the modem.
It would be really really great if Viasat could, like most other major ISPs, just send out a replacement modem instead of asking the customer to schedule time to wait for technician dispatches that are unnecessary based on the reported issue.