MediaCom

As far as I’m aware, Oelwein residents have only two choices for internet: MediaCom and CenturyLink. I’ve heard good things about CenturyLink, but their internet packages don’t have the same speed that MediaCom does, so we went with MediaCom.
We’ve had their service for about two years. Getting it set up was surprisingly simple. Just had to call and set everything up. The bill came every month like clockwork, and it was simple to pay. We purchased our own Modem instead of renting one (saved money too!), and while it took some digging through Customer Service reps, I was finally able to get a list of routers that would be acceptable for our service so we could purchase our own. If you don’t want to pay an extra $ 5 a month, there’s no reason not to provide your own Modem instead of paying the rental fee.
As for service, the internet hasn’t been quite as fast as advertised, but that’s standard with a lot of internet services. Its usually pretty close, and I’d consider it totally acceptable in terms of speed.
The biggest downside is the reliability. The internet went down pretty regularly — about once a day for at least ten minutes. On occasions, it’d be down for the entire evening. Calling the MediaCom «report an outage» line did pretty much nothing since it’s just an automated message asking you to be patient and they know about the issue. I suppose they don’t want to be bogged down with a ton of calls, but it would have made me feel better to speak to an actual person. On the occasions when we tried calling customer service to try and figure out what was going on, we’d stay on hold for over 20 minutes before just giving up.
Cancelling my account was really easy, though. I went in, and within five minutes, the account was cancelled and my bill was paid off. I was surprised it was so simple.
Be aware that I’m not 100% sure of the hours at this location. The MediaCom website says that it’s Monday through Friday, but there are multiple taped signs to the door that say they are only open on a certain day of the week starting on some certain day. There were a lot, a lot of signs about the hours, and I didn’t stop to read them. They were open on a Thursday when I went in, though. Be aware that the office is inside of a small office suite.
Final thoughts: Not great, but it could be much, much worse. Internet worked most of the time, but their call-​support customer service seems to be pretty horrendous. I’d go into the office when possible if you need something done. The billing was fair and on-​time, though, so it mostly does the job.