The old squirrel was telling me this morning over coffee. Winter has locked and loaded and we are getting both barrels he feels. ACS, tore up the road in front of the house and had us blocked in the drive way all day yesterday. They were laying new cable and my driveway took the beating of all the digging. I don’t think they will put it back to normal it’s going to be a mess next spring he said. They had to dig under the culvert that was there. They dinged it a couple of times. Not only that they didn’t compact the dirt under the area they dug and or over the pipe when they recovered it. It’s liable to subside with the moisture in the spring and cave in the pipe. I suspect I’ll be asking for relief from ACS before it’s all over with next year. Not only that they still accidently got into the cable for the phone lines that run around Victoria Circle. It didn’t affect our service but the rest of the neighborhood was down. I suppose then they had to splice the cable before they reburied it.
I don’t know what the average consumer pays for a medium speed dsl line from Alaska Communication System. I pay an average of over 100 dollars a month. As many of you know, I stream over the Internet on Ustream.tv and here lately my stream lags considerably. It makes my stream unintelligible on the receiving end. When you do a speed test to ACS in Anchorage where the servers are, the speed level is fine. It’s the next leg down to the Lower 48 where my real market for my content is that the speed falls to undesirable levels. We pay the highest price for such services and yet it fails to live up to the promise of the broadband Internet. Why is Alaska’s cost for services consistently higher than the lower continental states? ACS fails to provide any measurable benefit for the extra cost that we pay and the service falls below what is consistently available elsewhere. In fact Chris Pirillo was streaming from a tour boat in the Hawaiian Islands this last week and his stream was better than mine. It’s the same old song and dance for Alaskans. Whether it be in fuel prices or consumer goods and services. The consumer is short changed for the price we pay.
