from Mike Greene, RockIsland
Please be advised that CenturyLink is still running at very much reduced capacity for DSL service and dial-tone services in San Juan County, and on San Juan Island in particular.
At this time any DSL related issues are being “grouped” into a master ticket with CenturyLink, regardless if it is related to the fiber cut or not. This is not our doing, CenturyLink repair is treating all DSL trouble tickets in SJ County this way. We are still logging trouble tickets to get the issue on “record” and will continue to track individual issues within our ticketing system until they are resolved.
Also be advised that presently the capacity required for SJI DSL service is less than half what it needs to be. This is going to cause all sorts of issues ranging from extreme slowdowns, disconnects or stalled sessions requiring you to reboot your modem to log back into the system. We do not know if CenturyLink is doing this to help spread out demand by forcing customers to log back in or if this is a by-product of the reduced capacity—or both.
Tuesday afternoon we offered spare equipment to CenturyLink to provide a temporary link between San Juan Island and Lopez, and we repeated our offer on Wednesday, Thursday and again over the weekend; CenturyLink hasn’t taken us up on the offer and it is unlikely they will. We have the equipment on hand to make up the other half of what is needed for DSL service, but for whatever reason they don’t think it is necessary.
We suggested that CenturyLink hand off all of our SJI Customer traffic in Friday Harbor so we can transport that traffic off island using our own private backbone; they have acknowledged that “may” be possible and would “look into it.” If they would permit this we could reduce demand on the temporary fix and restore our customers DSL service on SJI to 100 percent.
The latest update on the barges looking for the fiber cable: Our understanding is that the cable has been located and is in the process of being raised in the hopes of finding and determining the extent of the damage and what it will take to repair the cable, if that is even possible.
We have been posting updates to our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RockI
This kind of thing does NOT make CL look good at all — they seem to be putting customer service WAY last, in spite of all of their puffing. Why would they turn down an offer to get people back on line as soon as possible? Why would they not bother to have a working backup system in place? This is getting tedious…
Bottom line, Century Link does not want to cooperate with RockIsland because they would loose customers to them this way.
If they “hand off” RockIsland DSL customer traffic to RockIsland at their FH data center like Mike is asking (and has been asking for years), it would mean better service for RockIsland DSL customers. From what I understand there is no technical reason this can not happen.
I have been grateful throughout this mess that we have Rock Island as our internet provider and could communicate via email when phone connections didn’t work.
AND — equally important — we could receive the frequent updates on Orcas Issues about what was happening. Knowing what was going made it easier and safer for all.
A big thank you to all of the extra work Margie, Lynn and the staff of Orcas Issues have done to make this possible.
Double ditto on all the above! We LOVE Rock Island!!