being ripped off by Mediacom high speed internet

I live in Ankeny Iowa and have been using Mediacom's high speed internet for

the last three years with no problems until a month ago. I was try to use

my connection to play an online game and kept getting dropped from the

server. I went out to the web to try some speed tests, which had horrible

results. Basically, I am paying $65 a month for 5mb (5000 kbps)download and

the test I ran come back at 300-900 kbps). I called into Tech support and

told them how slow my speed was. They did some checking and decided to send

out a tech to take a look. The tech changed around some wiring and checked

the signal, he then decided it had to be my modem (since it was a little

warm). He brought in the new modem but was unable to get it to work since

their website for registering it to my account was down. He left the modem

(not working) and said he would take care of getting it registered by the

time I got home from work. I came home to a modem that was not registered,

but at least I could get to their website to do it myself. After I got the

modem working again I went and did some speed test, with the same horrible

result. I called back in to tech support, the did some more checking and

sent me an email with a different speed test (a batch file that pings

www.yahoo.com 20 times and then does a trace route which is exported to a

text file). I sent back the results which showed response times of 2400+

miliseconds (ms). Incase you don't already know the average response time i

should get is around 42ms. I got an email back from tech support stating

they looked at my results and "the numbers there look pretty good". I

emailed him back asking basically if he was insane. I then got another

email inresponse from a different tech telling me he "reset the device and

this problem seems to have been resolved" and to call back if I had any more

problems. Did some more speed test same horrible result, so I called them a

third time. This person was somewhat helpful, she saw that I was getting

numerous timeouts on the T3 connection and would send someone out to fix it.

The second tech comes to my house, checks all the same stuff the first one

did and then decided he needed to run a new line from the main box in my

backyard to the side of my house (now i have a cable laying accross my

grass). This didn't solve my problem. I told him that the person I talked

to told me I was getting timeouts on the T3, he then informed me that he

couldn't fix that and would have to send out the line guys. As soon as he

left I called tech support (very frustrated) and asked why they would send

someone out they knew couldn't fix my problem. She informed me that they

couldn't directly send out the line guys and that only an onsight tech could

do that. I asked to talked to a supervisor and was put on hold for almost

10 minutes. She came back on and told me that she had talked to the

supervisor and was told to call dispatch to see if the line guys could come

out that day, if not it could take up to 72 hours. I never did get to

talked to this supervisor I asked for several times. I then kept checking

my speed all the way through the 72 hours the said it could take with no

improvement, so at the end of the 72 hours I called tech support again. I

asked to talk to a supervisor at the begining of the call, It took an hour

and a half of try this try that (which I had already done three times on

other calls). He then decided they needed to send another tech to my house.

I asked what else they could possible do, since they had already replace

everything form the main box going to my house. Fianlly I get to talk to the

supervisor I originally asked for. After some discussion I asked her if the

problems I was having was because they oversold their bandwith when the

started offering 10mb download speeds. She said that she wouldn't put it

that way, and it was more like the underestimated the demand. She then told

me that everyone in Ankeny was sharing one server (I assume she meant

router) and that they were slated to put in a second "server" in three

weeks. She told me she would give me a month credit and I could either have

another tech come to my house (to do nothing) or wait three weeks for the

new "server" to be put in. Meanwhile they are still billing me $65 a month

for these unusable speeds. If it doesn't improve before they put in a new

"server" I would have to continue to call back to receive credits. What I

got out of all this over the last two weeks was that everyone in Ankeny is

paying $65+ a month for service they are not receiving and unless everyone

calls (and can deal with the 2 week runaround) to complain there will be no

credits to anyone, even though Mediacom knows this is a huge problem and

everyone is having it.