My background is in Telecom. I grew up in NoVa when MCI was making some noise. I have years of experiences trying to get the phone companies to charge a fair price for their services, and trying get them to bill it correctly and support the services they sell. Hey like everything on the Net I can still consider myself and expert. Because of this expertise, I feel compelled to start blogging about today’s Telco issues. I would very much like to get comments for users and scholars alike. .
Tonight I want to discuss the DSL services provided in the rural towns of Kalispell and Yellow Bay Montana.
Back in November of 2006 my wife Jan and I purchased the Grease Monkey in Kalispell MT and immediately began upgrading the dial up modems and credit card processing machine to DSL. At the same time we ordered DSL for a home office in Yellow Bay. The price for the residential service in Yellow Bay is about 60% lower than the same service pricing for the Grease Monkey in town.
Both services require at least one TDM phone line, so the telco continues to try and protect the monopoly market position and insist I pay for a phone line I don’t need. If that was the end of the story. The reality of the situation is the commercial service has never been acceptable, since it was installed. Despite hours of efforts from the Telco technicians’ the service often denigrates to upload speeds below 24kbps, the download speed, which is sold to me as a 3mb download barely gets to 800kbps. It's sad and an embarrassment.
Our wifi networks move data at 54mbps. Why does the phone company try to suggest I will be satisfied with DSL even if it worked at the best speeds they offer ? The Yellow Bay circuit has been much more reliable, but it has gone down at least three times for more than an hour in the past 6 months. One of the things the phone company use to be known for was a reliable service, and it seems they have now accepted lower standards because the complexity of the offering and hardware has increased.
Hopefully soon technology will advance enough to push by the Telco’s. Rural markets like Kalispell and Yellow Bay will be some of the last markets to move.