Well, speaking from my own experience, I have an incredibly fast connection with Thunderbird, the service is always reliable and I've never had any problems getting through to somebody if I have a question.  The cost is almost half of what I was paying for satellite.  I work from home and rely on my internet connection to be available, every day, all day.  My service went down for half of a day one day, and that was because my own router burned out due to age and had nothing to do with Thunderbird.  Otherwise, it's been flawless.  My experience with Thunderbird over these last few months has been far far better than my cumulative experience of years with my previous satellite internet provider.  This sounds more like a user issue to me.

Byron

living in the country with high speed internet and loving it ...