Sunflower Broadband Low Income Bait and Switch Stealing Poverty Life-Line Overage Charges Theft Lawrence Kansas

I am a single mom with two school age children. Recently I saw that the local cable company was offering a "Free" broadband service for low income households. The service is called "Life Line" and is supposed to be free.

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2007/dec/19/sunflower_offers_lifeline_internet/

Since my oldest daughter is in middle-school, I thought it would be a good idea to get internet access for our home, so I applied for the service. I live on a small income so this wasn't something that we could afford otherwise, I thought it was great.

I was approved for the service and the cable company came out to install it, the service worked OK. It was kind of slow, but it was free and my daughter was able to start using the Internet for school.

Well, it was all fine and good until I got the first bill. (Yeah, I know it was supposed to be Free). The bill was for over $100!

For their "Free" service the company charged me $39 for installation, $5/Mo for the modem, a $10 "Connection Charge" each month.

Then they charged me over $40 in "overage fees" for using too much bandwidth. I admit that my daughter started spending a lot of time online, but I don't allow her to use file sharing software. Most of her time is spent watching documentary movies about horses.

Then there were a whole bunch of other fees too. Well, I called my sister and borrowed the money to pay the bill, but I feel like I was taken by this company. The service was supposed to be free, it wasn't and if they hadn't advertised it as free I would never have signed up.

I am sending this from a friend's house because I no longer have Internet access and now I can't even afford the dial-up access that we had before.

Lawrence_kansas
Lawrence, Kansas
U.S.A.