At some point, Waitsfield Telecom's constant service interruptions will
result in loss of life or property when a Valley resident is unable to
contact emergency services via a phone service which one expects to be
able to depend on to be 100 percent reliable - particularly in a rural
mountainous area where cellular service is not always available.
Warren recently approved changes to its zoning regulations in order to
permit cellular wireless transmitters in the village, which will help to
alleviate a cellular dead spot in The Valley for certain cellular
carriers (Verizon in particular); however, those transmitters have yet
to be installed and will not be until spring 2011 at the earliest.
Never have I experienced phone service problems like are occurring on a
constant basis in Warren. And when outages did occur during my
25-plus-year residency in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the former Bell of
Pennsylvania/Verizon always compensated its customers who were without
service for any period of time.
Just ask the businesses which are being inconvenienced by these constant
outages, when in this day of credit card transactions, they are unable
to process transactions for their customers as they are forced into an
unexpected cash-only situation whether it be for gas or miscellaneous
groceries at Mac's, a general purchase at The Warren Store or dinner at
The Pitcher Inn. I would be hard pressed to hear that Waitsfield Telecom
has exhibited little if any remorse to those establishments for the
inconvenience their lack of phone/internet service has put them under.
So, back to the basic question... what will it take to get reliable phone service in the Mad River Valley?
Craig J. Klofach lives in Warren.
Editor's Note:
Earlier this week, The Valley Reporter contacted Kurt Gruendling,
vice president of marketing for Waitsfield and Champlain Valley
Telecom, regarding the January 3 phone outage. His response appears
below.
"Some Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom customers in the Mad River
Valley experienced a brief interruption of telephone and internet
service on Monday evening, January 3. The outage was the result of a
fiber-optic equipment failure on the core fiber ring that serves
multiple switching sites in The Valley.
"According to Gregg Haskin, president and CEO, 'We know that telephone
and Internet service are critical to our customers and our technicians
were dispatched immediately. Technicians quickly diagnosed and replaced
the faulty equipment which kept the downtime to a minimum. After a
hardware failure like this, we work directly with the manufacturer to
determine the root cause to prevent future issues. We work very hard to
maintain a high level of redundancy and fault tolerance in our network
and are constantly working to enhance our network reliability and
increase overall reliability.'"
