TDS Telecommunications
Reviews and Complaints

I spoke with a sales rep on the phone and was assured I could stream live TV to a mobile device in my home wirelessly hooked to my internet. That is NOT true. There are a couple channels I can see live, and it's by going to the TV networks site. None of my favorites can I watch through my Ipad like I used to. The website is extremely user unfriendly trying to find anything out, and the techs teach you virtually nothing. I asked 5 separate people about the live TV issue and every one of them said I don't know. How does TECHNICAL SUPPORT not know anything about how to use their service? They have a list of "favorites" on their website for channels and apparently those are picked for you based solely on your zip code and you as the client cannot add "favorites" to the list, so what's the use of labeling it favorites? NONE of mine are on that list and no one can even tell me if there is a way to add it! When speaking to technical support I was told "well you should have been given a booklet that walks you through how to use the website, we normally don't do that". There is no booklet telling me anything except the web address of the site, and that's it. That does not explain anything at all how to use it. I work on the net all day and cannot figure out their site, imagine how someone would feel who seldom uses the net. I came home from dinner, we turned the TV on and all I get is a large TDS symbol on my tv, on the first day of service. Not impressive at all. Based on being LIED TO in order to get me to sign up for the service I am completely disgusted with TDS at this point.

I have had horrid Internet and telephone service from TDS for the last 17 months. In May of 2014, I started getting dropped Internet connections on my TDS DSL line. It started with a few a day and progressed to a dozen or more an hour. It was totally unreliable service. In the past year and a half I have had over 50 problem tickets open with the TDS repair department. It takes at least 45 minutes of phone time to get the problem ticket open. The problem tickets are quickly closed. Sometimes a repair technician will come to the house; most of the time they do not. No calls to inform me something was done or even that the problem ticket was close. It was up to me to figure that out by calling TDS repair again. Surprise, the ticket was closed days ago. The problem has not changed. Many times the ticket was closed the same day it was opened. Now I get to waste more time opening another TDS problem ticket. After 14 months of this and many, many calls to TDS, the problem was isolated to a bad cable between my house and the street. This is the same cable that TDS said tested good multiple times. The problem was isolated to the cable by running a temporary cable across the ground to my house. Since that cable was run, I have not had a single dropped connection. It has now been 2 more months and TDS still has not completed the job. I still have a "temporary" telephone cable running across the ground from the street to my house. Just laying out there on the ground. I have filed a complaint with the FCC. The TDS response to the FCC was similar to the response I have been getting every time I open a TDS problem ticket, "The problem has been resolved". The FCC close the complaint based on that response. I am not sure when they will get around to burying the cable. Sooner or later someone is going to trip over it or something worse. TDS is the most inept phone company I have ever dealt with. If I had a choice, I would have switched long ago.

I am a new customer to this very small telecom and after several phone calls I have come to the conclusion that this company has very poor customer service and absolutely no interest in changing that. After an install where the installer gave me no information and did not care to see if I had any questions, I went to the companies website on information to set up my email. This was a circle of no answers. A phone call remedied the issue but not without its struggles. So this morning I spend over an hour chasing broken links on the website trying to figure out voicemail. Again, the website was not helpful. I called and spent almost an hour on hold before reaching a rep. He could not help me. He tranferred me to tier 2, who also could not help me after looking at my account he could not find the proper access code to set up my voicemail. I was then transferred to telephony where I asked to speak with a supervisor. I gave Vanessa (the supervisor) my information and told her about my frustrating experience thus far. Vanessa at this point informed me that I do not have voicemail on my account! She could add it for $3 a month. I requested she do so and pro rate it for 6 months for my horrible customer service experience; no dice, she is not authorized to give such discounts. So now I have no voicemail, I have wasted 4 hours of my time, all because no one bothered to let me know voicemail is a feature for purchase. What a horrid experience!

For months, the internet connection has been extremely slow. Not anywhere near the speed being paid for. TDS lies about the capability of the connection, as evidenced by the fact that after my first FCC complaint, the speed was great for a week, and now it's almost worse than to begin with. Companies like this should be put out of business.

I received your notice today about increasing my high speed internet service by $5.25 a month but if I went to www.tdstelecom.com/credit and filled out the form and submitted it I would get $5.00 credit each month for two years.
Well I have been trying to do that for quite a while now but because you put the SUBMIT box in the last paragraph of the form it will not work for us.
Please fix your form so I and others can take advantage of this offer. Thank you!
Carol Peebles
[protected]@tds.net

I am a snowbird I put my account on vacation I did not go to my Winter home last year in April I got a call from a collections company saying I owe Tds I contacted Tds and paid my bill and told them to keep me on Vacation which is $10 a Month now in August I get a call from a collections company saying I owe them $85 and now I owe $30 a Month I am not in Quartzsite so I am getting nothing for owing this money if they would have told me my bill would be 30 a Month I would have told them to shut it down I already paid $150 and got no service for it why would I pay another $150 or more for no service

we just got tds tv and internet less than a week ago so far the local channels we like to watch are out of service more than they work, worst part is i paid them $150.00 to install this service im on the phone with them right now i been transfered around numerous times now i been on the hold for atleast 30 minutes i got better service from my antennae

For the past 8 years, I have tried to pay my TDS bill by using their absolutely pitiful, horribly inadequate online pay service. It has been through many sotfware changes and "upgrades", and I am forced to have a TDS.net email address in order to use the site. Is this so they can count me as one of their 'users' maybe? I have no idea, but once again, the site is not accepting my password, or any of my answers to my 'security questions'. Since history dictates nothing but trouble with their online payment system, the LAST TIME I was forced to contact customer service and have all my info reset, I carefully copied every letter and number in every answer I used and saved it for reference. I entered everything exactly as it should be entered, and I now I am locked out because it doesn't recognize me. Now I will have to contact the CS department and sit through a very long phone call while they look up my info, then listen to my issue, then transfer me to yet another rep who will not have the info in front of them so I will have to repeat everything and then they waste their time and mine with the obligatory 'OH I am so sorry" and all of the other lines they have to use.
I attempted to use the AUTO PAY because I did not want to deal with the website every month, but of course that didn't work because there was an extra charge on the month that I was unaware of -
This is unbelievable. I have never had so many problems with an online pay service. I would LOVE to switch to another carrier, but we have a phone number that we need to keep and it is non transferable. The last two times I called TDS, I requested a supervisor rather than go through a regular level rep, but they have to waste my time by gathering all my info prior to transferring me - it is just too much and I have been forced to contact them like this too many times.
Can I just mail them a check? Yes, of course, but that is not the point and I should be able to use their EPAY service without such continual hassle.
I do have one positive thing to say about TDS and their customer service: I have always been able to understand the people clearly, never had to ask them to repeat themselves because their accent was too strong, so they must have an excellent hiring department. When I have called my cable company, Time Warner, I have actually felt like I was on a tour in the jungle trying to understand the tour guide, so I will give points to TDS for being smart enough to realize the people on the other end of the phone will need to understand the words coming out of their agents.
So, I will have to take time out of my day tomorrow and go through the same process I have gone through now, oh, about 4 times. What a waste of time when I am following all their instructions.

I've lived in this area of Wisconsin my entire life, so I can tell you for sure that there's only two internet service providers that will actually service our town: TWC, and TDS. Even then, their coverage is sketchy at best; TWC will only cover select areas nearest to the center of town.
So being on the outskirts, we only had TDS to turn to. And when we did, we were charged exorbitant prices and received half-assed coverage and virtually NO customer service was available, unless you decided to take half the day off in order to spend the majority of a three hour phone call on hold.
Let's start with those ludicrous prices. Being so far out in the boonies, I knew that the internet bill was going to be asinine. When I signed up I was locked into a two year contract, with the promise that the first year would cost me $49.95 a month, and they actually did honor that promise. After that year was up, the price was raised to around $65 and some odd cents. Now mind you, this is JUST internet, no cable package included, and I'm paying nearly $70 for it. Now, okay, I MIGHT be able to stomach that price- if the customer service and internet coverage had been superb. This was however, not the case at all.
The internet coverage fails half the time. I would attempt to connect my laptop to the network, only to half it alert me that it was unable to connect to the internet. Upon further inspection, the router showed a connection to the internet, but no wireless signal was being put out. I've reset that damn router more times than I've gone to Wal-Mart in the three-year period that I've had TDS! Besides that, the speed is slower than molasses in January, and the router has been known to, on occasion, spastically shut down.
Now let's address the icing on the cake: the atrocious customer service. When I took these complaints to the TDS homepage, I got a meager "sorry" and an offer to increase my internet speed (with a price increase, of course). That's it. I declined and asked who I could call to send someone out to check on things, and lo and behold, I got no response. Since then, I haven't even tried to deal with the supposed "customer service", but they're gracious enough to send me ads and pamphlets at least 1-4 times a month.
So all in all, I would really recommend not signing up for their scam if you can help it.

Their advertising is misleading. I already had their phone service and opted to get internet and Dish added. It was advertised Get Free internet for 1 yr. with commitment to Dish for two years. Now their telling me that the two yr. commitment included the internet and want to charge me $300 early termination fee for internet I have had over a year and a half. They have also overcharged me for my service the last few months. BUYER BEWARE! This company is a rip-off and I have the statements to prove it!

Recently TDS was doing a conversion from google (Gmail) to another company that is in financial trouble. I wasn't affected by the conversion until we decided to go IP phone and drop our DSL for Comcast because of slow connection speeds. This is when we started having issues with our email accounts that we have used for 7 + years. After we contacted TDS and dropped our DSL my wife's email account just stopped working. A month later they still haven't got it fixed and we were told it was Google’s fault because they didn't give them enough time. After a month went by with no results I decided to drop the overpriced analog telephone service for voice over ip. Shortly after we dropped our phone service my email stopped working even though we told TDS we wanted to keep these two email accounts. Anyway, both my wife and I are now without any access to our email accounts that we have had for over 7 years now. It's crazy that only after we dropped some of our services that we had with TDS that we both lost our email accounts. Doesn't this sound suspicious!

Last, isn't there some kind of agreement that TDS has with our government to provide a reliable service to its customers? My questions to those people who granted TDS a monopoly in our community; why isn't AT&T, Bell South, ...etc allowed to compete with TDS. It sounds like TDS needs some competition because the QOS (quality of service) is unexceptable for any company doing business with the public.

Contact your congressman to have these laws changed to protect us the consumer.

TDS Telecom is the sole telephone (land line) provider in my area and their service is worse than found in primitive 3rd world countries. There is a constant humming on the telephone so loud that communication is often totally impossible. I am trying to run a home business and I have had hundreds of dollars in lost revenue due to poor service on my telephone line.

Numerous calls to the company falls on deaf ears. The last time I spoke with a "supervisor" who personally told me that TDS Telecom had no plans on fixing the problem and that we would have to "live with it." He also noted that the problem was shared by other users in my area.

TDS Telecom does not care about customers, service, or anything remotely professional in their dealings with consumers.

If there was another choice for a telecommunications provider in my area, I would switch in a heart beat.

Unfortunately, even cell phones don't work in my area so we are basically cut off from telephone service.

Very very unhappy with TDS Telecom.

We have talked to Erika Patzer at [protected] as well as her boss, Mara Jarvee (not sure on the spelling) at [protected]. We have also attempted to contact Marree's boss, Kristy Kipe (once again, unsure of the spelling) at the number we were given, [protected], which does not seem to be the correct number.

Back about a year ago, a salesperson from TDS contacted us and put together a quote. He promised us that if things didn't work out, whether because of a better deal, or just not being happy with their service, we could cancel at any time with no penalties. Largely due to this promise, We signed up for their telephone and internet service. From the beginning, we had problems with their equipment, including buzzing in the phones, the phones occasionally not working, the internet occasionally not working, the equipment being noisy, and the telephone bell we have (so that we can hear the phone when we are in the shop) not ringing. We called and asked them to fix each problem, and as far as the phone and/or internet being down they did, as for noisy equipment and buzzing in the phones, they said they didn't hear it.

The bell, however, they seemed to agree was a problem, but they couldn't see to get it working. They came and looked at it, said they fixed it, but the next day it was the same as ever, they came back and said we needed a higher voltage to the bell which would come from them replacing there equipment. The tech asked his boss for the correct equipment, but his boss would not allow him to give it to us as it was not the current model they were using. Apparently, for TDS a working bell was impossible.
After months of messing around with their system and never getting it working, we got a call from Qwest offering us an equal deal to what TDS was giving us, so it finally seemed silly to keep messing around with the TDS system that never worked right; we called and asked if there would be any issues with cancelling, they said no, there would be no problems and we could have Qwest come and install it whenever and TDS would come to get there equipment whenever we did. We had Qwest come and install their phone system and internet again, and everything worked great, we had our bell, good call clarity, and no noisy equipment. We were happy.

A few weeks later, we got a bill from TDS. The bill was for a cancellation fee of around $3700! That's right, nearly 4 grand to cancel our service from a company that promised no cancellation fees!

We tried filing a BBB claim (which seems not to have gotten to the correct TDS location, as such, it was closed.), We tried filing a claim with the Public Utilities Commission, and we tried talking to our service rep at TDS. Nothing we tried made any progress, but in the meantime, TDS forwarded our bill to a collection agency. After much discussion and feeling that we had no other options, we signed back up with TDS; they had agreed to cancel the old cancellation fee if we signed a new contract.
We continued to receive angry phone calls from bill collectors who called us liars when we explained the deal we had with TDS and told us we still needed to pay them.

Finally, the TDS tech came to install our new service, but he was unable to complete it because we had to set up our networks to handle the weirdnesses of TDS's internet connection. He said he would come back the next day to finish. He didn't come back the next day. Or Monday.

Today (Tuesday the 23) we arrived to the shop and found that our phones were disconnected. We called our rep who didn't answer, so we left a message. She did get a tech out too us after a while, but we lost a fair amount of business, and the trust of anyone who called us during the time we had no phone (do you trust a business after you call and it says that their line is no longer in service?)

So we are off to an even worse start than last time, though they did manage to get the bell working this time. I called and talked to a number of people at TDS, who said that they would let us out of our contract for free, but that our old early termination fee would go back into effect; clearly this doesn't help solve the problem.

We would like to get out of our contract with no fee, as it's clear that service will be just as bad as before, and we still will have nothing but problems. We want a phone system that just works. every time. Qwest fits that, TDS doesn't.

I am a customer of TDS Telecom and have been since moving here 21 years ago. They provide our telephone service as well as our internet service which I have. I have had a computer for the past 9 years with a dail up speed of 48-50 in 2000 and NOW IT IS 26.4. After this morning attempting to order books for Christmas gifts from Amazon & spending one and one- half hours to order 5 (which should have gone quickly) I have no more patience left with this carrier. I have called and called and keep asking when are we going to get DSL and all they do is put us on a stupid tracking list. I live up state route 621 in Craig County, VA, and we are not as remote as other remote areas in this county and THEY HAVE DSL. Dial up is just CRAP for service! I am 68 yrs. old and all I do is wait, wait & wait. I am wasting my life sitting at this durn computer with TDS as carrier & will probably die in front of the durn thing before TDS gets off their "tuckus" and gets us DSL. If I had the extra cash I would certainly have purchased either Hughes.net or Dishmail.net for my carrier, but I am retired and single and too disabled to work any more to purchase another carrier. When my son's family gave me my computer as I retired it was the most wonderful means of communicating I had ever seen. It was my entertainment, loved to browse the websites and it still is educational. Now it is nothing but an aggravation!

I keep calling and asking when we are going to have DSLK in my area. My friend over in the same county, but more remote got DSL a couple of weeks ago and that is definitely in the durn boondocks!

This situation is nothing but a "hemorrhoid." You get the drift!

I have been a customer since 2002, and have had some issues over the years (about 1 a year billing, dsl speed) that have mostly been resolved i.e. lower than paid for DSL broadband that went on for months.

Jan 29th of 2009 I was no longer able to upload to my web site, could open and get to TDS servers but no folders existed to upload too. I logged 18 phone calls to resolve this with the average wait time of 1 hour 25 minutes each phone call. CSR says they too have the same problem on their end and don't know what to do? After going through every imaginable trouble shooting I had enough.

Front line customer service are friendly enough but no base knowledge. Complaints and tickets were closed with resolved yet no one had resolved them. In some cases No Response ticket was entered into the system, in others they would just issue a new ticket number. Still others they would pass up the chain. (I now realize there is no up the chain that can help).

I removed my web from their service and now have issues with downloading email since they have gone to gmail on May 09. CSR says they have the same issue when they try to download my emails on their end. We have tried both Mozella and Outlook to no avail.

Is TDS just wanting to drop long term customers, do they just not care enough to trouble shoot and fix things? TDS now stand for Terribly Dismal Service here in Milwaukee.