Comcast has once again distinguished itself as an extraordinary company - not only do Americans trust it less than any other company on the list, it occupies the two bottom positions.  Big shocker that communities want better local service with their own networks.  

Accoding to the 2011 Temkin Trust Ratings, which looks at the level of trust that consumers have in 143 large U.S. companies in a total of 12 industries, only eight companies earned "very strong" ratings while 26 earned "very weak" ratings.

Comcast was the worst. But it is in the company we would expect - Time Warner Cable and Charter are close to the bottom also.

Minnesota Public Radio, as part of its Ground Level Broadband Coverage has profiled WindomNet with a piece called "Who should build the next generation of high-speed networks?"

Dan Olsen, who runs the municipal broadband service in Windom, was just about to leave work for the night when he got a call. The muckety-mucks at Fortune Transportation, a trucking company on the outskirts of town, were considering shuttering their office and leaving the area.

"They said, Dan, you need to get your butt out here now," Olsen recalls. "I got there and they said, 'You need to build fiber out here. What would it take for you to do it?'"

Fortune, which employs 47 people in the town of 4,600, two and a half hours southwest of the Twin Cities, relies on plenty of high-tech gadgetry. Broadband Internet access figures into how the company bids for jobs, communicates with road-bound truckers, controls the temperatures in its refrigerated trucks and remotely views its office in Roswell, New Mexico. Fortune even uses the Internet to monitor where and to what extent drivers fill their gas tanks in order to save money.

Yet, when it was time to upgrade company systems three years ago, Fortune's private provider couldn't offer sufficient speeds.

That's where Windomnet came in. Though Fortune was a mile outside the municipal provider's service area, "We jumped through the hoops and made it happen," recalls Olsen. "The council said, "Do it and we'll figure out how to pay for it.' We got a plow and a local crew. We had it built in 30 days."

I have thought about this story frequently when I hear claims that publicly owned networks are failures. For years, lobbyists for cable and phone companies have told everyone in the state what a failure WindomNet has been - they crow about debt service exceeding revenue while ignoring the fact that all networks -- public and private -- take many years of losses before they break even because nearly all the costs of the network are paid upfront.

Toward the end of the article (which should be read in its entirely rather than in the snippets I repost here), Dan puts the matter in context:

Dan Olsen retorts that Windomnet was never designed to make money; one of the benefits of a municipal system is that nobody takes profits out of it. He says the plan was to break even by year five, which arrived in 2010, and it looks like they'll come within $50,000 of doing so.

"We don't charge enough to make money," says Olsen, noting that Windomnet serves the vast majority of the town's 2,000 homes with internet, phone, cable or all three. They also provide free service to city buildings and the library. "The point is not to make money, but to break even," Olsen says. "The number one goal of the system is to provide broadband to the residents of Windom."

And the vast majority of residents take service from WindomNet. With a population of 4600, meaning probably 2000 households, the network has 1846 fiber drops that are active with at least one service. They have people working for companies in South Dakota but able to work from home regularly due to the Internet connection. Compare that to Sibley County, where Qwest has not even bothered to offer DSL in the county seat of Gaylord!

And the customer service comes highly recommended. Again, from the MPR article:

For his part, Dale Rothstein, who runs the IT systems at Fortune in Windom, says, "I get three calls per month from people trying to get me to convert. I say 'no.' Dan and Windomnet took care of us. I'm not going anywhere. It's a great relationship. When there is a problem, I call and it's taken care of. It's great to have a local company to deal with."

Major providers, like Frontier (famous for some of the worst DSL in the nation) pretend to be reasonable on the issue by claiming that publicly owned networks will make it harder to reach the highest cost households. This must be why Frontier is trying to derail the Sibley County project from building fiber-to-the-farm when Frontier can't even provide reliable slow DSL across all of its phone lines in the area. Not only does Frontier have no plan to connect these farmers, they have no reason to as such an investment would not generate sufficient return for them to be interested.

TDS has been the king of BS in this arena, putting out patently absurd press statements that reporters feel compelled to repeat no matter how implausible. Regarding Monticello, MN, which built a FTTH network compelling TDS to upgrade their poor DSL service (while also delaying the Monticello network with a year-long frivolous lawsuit that was eventually tossed out of court):

Fast forward to today, a city with two fiber networks. Andrew Petersen, director of external affairs for TDS, acknowledges "the importance of broadband to stimulate economic development in urban and rural communities" and says his company would have built a fiber network eventually, without prodding from the city. He believes the network may be somewhat ahead of its time, though.

Ha! Monticello begged TDS to invest in a modern network and TDS refused, saying that their DSL was perfectly suitable for what Monticello needed. They suddenly changed their mind when the City decided to build their own network to ensure not only faster, more reliable connections, but a LOCAL option.

Keep an eye on this MPR coverage of broadband - they have several of the few reporters in the state that have developed a good background in telecom and can get beyond the soundbites too common in broadband coverage. Well done.

This article led to a great response on Connected Planet Online by Joan Engebretson:

Take this quote from a Frontier executive cited in the MPR story. “Simply pouring money into projects that overbuild and compete with networks built by private investment discourages private investment and does not help reach those highest cost households,” the exec said. “Duplication of the network is no guarantee of success, and is often simply a waste of both public and private resources.”

This argument, of course, ignores the fact that if the new facilities truly were simply a “duplication” of what was already there, there would be no need for them and local municipalities would not be taking on the task of building the new higher-speed networks.

Exactly.

Just how does the largest citywide community fiber network in the country deal with the thousands of people that want to subscribe? It is a daunting task, but the Times Free Press has an answer: a carefully scripted process.

Chattanooga's Electric Power Board (EPB) largely contracts with a company for the labor to do the installs:

Adesta is responsible for 80 percent of EPB's fiber-to-the-home installations, according to Lansford, project manager for Adesta. EPB itself performs the remaining 20 percent, as well as trouble calls.

Beginning in June 2009, Adesta ramped up from a one-man office to more than 120 locally hired technicians, and now performs an average of 500 installations per week, or about 100 every day, he said.

At the end of October, when the article was written, Adesta had hired some 123 technicians - more than twice as many as they originally expected to need. Perhaps the largest advantage of contracting with a company like Adesta for connecting subscribers is the company's ability to quickly hire more technicians as demand increases. Civil service rules for hiring can hamper hiring when all installs are done in-house. EPB directly employes some thirty installers.

Chattanooga closely supervises the training and quality of work from the contracted technicians. Perhaps the biggest downside to hiring outside contractors for this work is the potential for technicians not being invested in the satisfaction of the customer or rushing from install to install to maximize their income. In Chattanooga, they expect technicians to do two installs per day to avoid encouraging shortcuts.

In talking with an employee of another muni fiber network, he was amazed at the efficiency of Chattanooga's backoffice processes. The Times Free Press was also impressed:

From a control room in EPB, Abed manages every call that goes out, and knows the location of EPB and Adesta trucks at all times. A computer assigns work based on efficiency, and trouble calls are automatically routed to the nearest available unit.

Even in Chattanooga, which has had more of a smooth roll-out than most, getting into apartment buildings (MDU) is difficult:

In addition to servicing homes and businesses, EPB and Adesta have begun rolling out service to apartments as well, he said, addressing a key hole in their service. The reason for the delay, he said, is that installers have to negotiate with the property owners to make the changes to their property before they can offer the service to renters.

As we see in community network after community network, the EPB installers go out of their way to help subscribers with great customer service:

"I was blown away," he said. "I had a DVD player that wasn't playing through the TV, and they even spent 10 or 15 minutes trying to hook that up. That wasn't part of their job description."
But what customers really want, Lansford said, aside from a trouble-free installation and uninterrupted, speedy service, is a yard sign that tells neighbors, "We've got it!"

Looking at the results of customer satisfaction surveys provided by EPB, they are making a great impression on subscribers. Consider this: 97% of respondents either somewhat agreed or strongly agreed that "The technician(s) who installed my EPB Fiber Optics services arrived in the expected timeframe." That isn't your ordinary cable or telephone company!

The worst level of satisfaction was the mere 93% who somewhat agreed or strongly agreed that "The technician(s) provided me with sufficient instructions I need to use my services." EPB has already reacted to those numbers by increasing the methods subscribers can use to learn about their services. For instance, EPB is making instructional videos and not only putting them on the Internet, but also on Video-on-demand. I have long argued video-on-demand is a key tool for starting to teach people about the technology they use on a daily basis.

Communities aspiring to have a world class network should pay attention to Chattanooga's approach.

Though it is rarely, if ever, the top motivation for a community to build its own broadband network, the idea of local customer service that is actually responsive to the community ranks usually among the top 5 motivations. We love the idea of a "strangle effect" -- coined by folks at Wilson's Greenlight in North Carolina. If something goes wrong, you can find someone nearby to strangle.

Compare that to these three stories.

First - a coworker of mine had to return a Comcast set-top box after cutting back on services. When he drove to the Comcast storefront, the outside drop box was full of gear, so he stepped inside to a room packed with Comcastic homicidal folks who had waited too long for attention from the overworked counter folk. He asked to just drop his box but they said he would have to take a number and wait... so he could set his Comcast box on the counter because no one had emptied the box outside where it should have been placed.

Another Comcast story comes to us from the Consumerist: where Comcast tries to repossess a cable modem is does not own.

Finally, David Pogue recently recounted the story of Qwest demanding that a customer call a specific phone number to report that his phone was not working. Rachel, the person who experienced the terrible service, writes:

Do you suppose all communications giants are like this? “We are abjectly sorry and have instructed our employees to grovel at your feet, but we are simply unable help you, value you though we do. Yes, we’re helpless. You know, we’re only a giant corporation. You can’t really expect us to help you, can you? We’re sure you understand. Please visit our Web site again to order more products!” Is it truly impossible to debug a VoIP modem problem via e-mail for some technical or philosophical reason?

Yes, Rachel, those massive communications giant are all like that. They have no obligation to any community they serve and while they employ good people who may genuinely want to help, they are structured to benefit shareholders, not subscribers.

A lesson for community broadband networks: focus on providing great customer service and making sure the community knows it.

Photo used under Creative Commons license, courtesy of Titanas on flickr.