| reply to Go Tarheels
Re: Has anyone bothered to read the bill? 3, 4, and 5 are not designed to level the playing field. It is designed to look that way while putting additional burden on the municipality that is not there for the private organization.
Bottom line is as it is my understanding.... the incumbents were asked to provide service and have refused. So this city is free to do what it wants. Again, you have these greedy bastards that don't want to serve the very people they should be serving because it isn't profitable enough for them, yet they don't want to allow them to serve themselves. They were given a chance and have declined so screw em, they can leave if they don't like the playing field.
If this city wants to create another tax just for the incumbents and have them pay for this 100% through that tax, then so be it. If they want to build a city owned broadband company and fund it any way they want that the people have approved, so be it. The city serves the people and if the people have spoken then the city does what the people have asked. If the private companies don't like and and don't want to compete then they can close up shop and move on. They aren't doing anyone any good being there, so they might as well leave. |
1 edit | OK...
It has been a LONG time since I've been involved with posting here. I'd be pretty surprised if anyone remembered me, but who knows.
Glad to see DSLreports is still flourishing.
Once upon a time, I was a contract DSL technician for a Florida-based contractor outfit who provided DSL techs to Sprint in pretty much any market DSL service was available.
Believe this or not, but Wilson, NC was my work area for roughly 3 years. I was able to get myself transferred from the Greenville, NC area to working the Wilson, NC market in or around 2001 and worked that area until I was contacted by a Linux OS vendor about a support job in May 2004.
There are a few things I want to say, but something I want to make sure folks understand. There are a lot of folks who don't live around here giving their opinions about this topic, quite understandably, but I want to make sure this is not lost in all the words flying back and forth:
Both Sprint and TWC are present and offering broadband service in Wilson city limits, and have been since at least 2001. The problem is _NOT_ that Embarq and TWC refused to offer service in the city of Wilson. They just didn't want to lose CONTROL of the service and offerings.
As "the DSL guy" that worked Sprint's Wilson, NC market for 3 years, I can say from firsthand experience that service was not great everywhere back then. Crappy service "just tends to happen" when you put a mini-DSLAM like an MRT (~30 customers) into a carrier and FEED THE WHOLE DAMN THING with one or two T1 lines.
There were a lot of places served by fullblown DSLAM's that had one or sometimes two DS3's. But after their initial rollout of equipment they installed in CO's -- when they started "reaching out" to get service to areas they just couldn't reach well with cables coming out of the DSLAM-equipped CO's and remotes, they expanded as cheaply as they could get away with.
This is completely aside from problems they had with Sprintlink, Redbacks, etc. which I know got worse after I left. We ended up switching from Sprint DSL to TWC at our home in Clayton, NC because the service went to crap and the folks on the phone were as idiotic as ever.
The point of all this is: TWC and Embarq WERE providing "service" in Wilson, NC. If the service they were providing was really good - and consistent in quality from one part of town to the next - then I would venture to say that the people of Wilson, and in turn, their elected officials, would not be looking to get something better in place.
Wilson, NC is a pretty unusual place. A lot of you probably don't know this, but a little over a year ago, much of the state of North Carolina was under very severe drought. VERY severe. Yet while many cities and communities were so low on water that many people were not allowed to water their grass AT ALL, the city of Wilson had a SURPLUS of water and was actually selling it to surrounding communities who had run out.
Why? Because the leaders of their community had VISION several years ago to take the kind of steps it would take to be prepared for such an eventuality. Some extra money they spent several years ago to build extra reservoirs etc. saved them a lot of trouble, and once again drew attention to them while everybody else around them was languishing. Sound familiar?
I am preparing to move to Wilson, NC from Clayton.
Cheers,
Machrider
PS: peace and "wassup" to all you other ex-outsource folks  |
