In my experience, most service providers are more interested in billing rather than providing service.
All except the super high $$ ISPs over commit service significantly at every point of their connectivity.
Only very few service contracts have I seen had any 'non-performance' clause in them.
When I had WildBlue, they were pretty good about giving refunds for 24 hour blocks AFTER I reported an outage.
When it was out for over 4 weeks and I called every day they finally got someone to come out and make it work again.
(One installer messes it up, then none were in the state, then they brought one in from two states over. Now there
are two within 5 miles but we are using SprintWireless card (slower, but less propagation delay, so my sensitive
test (wife) says it feels faster. So this is what we do!)
During that time WildBlue also gave excuses that my transponder was out on the satellite, I suggested they put me
on another transponder but that was 'impossible'. They said my earthstation downlink was out, basically weather in New York state... Why in the world do you EVER put a critical earth station in an area where there are known recurring weather issues
(i.e. SNOW in the winter)? .. Oh yes, that added to the propigation delay, because it went through about 6 routers before it got
dropped onto the open internet in Colorado? ... At least they could have dropped me on the internet in, oh say, NYCity! But nooooo, their network guru's were to smart to do something 'reasonable', so they PAID to have ALL the traffic dumpped to Colorado over land lines. ... Grumble, whine, ... These were my reasons for leaving Wildblue and going to ANYTHING that worked. Sprint wireless cards are by no means perfect, but it works. And yes, I wish I could get real bandwidth too (less than 2 miles from DSL access, $25,000 install fee if we want cable, or $650/mo for a T1 (not bad, but out of my price range)).