Recall Suddenlink Communications? Many clients are unhappy with its service and cost

Jenn Roeser, Inyo County 4th District Supervisor
Inyo County Fourth District Supervisor Jen Roeser is seeking feedback about service issues with Suddenlink Communications in preparation of Inyo County considering sending a letter to the company and the CA Public Utilities Commission as Mono, Placer and Nevada Counties, and the cities of Truckee and Mammoth Lakes have done.

Suddenlink
It is no secret that many local Suddenlink customers have long been dissatisfied with Suddenlink’s upward spiraling costs, especially for its high-speed internet service. And then there are the complaints of service disruptions, and what many consider very poor customer service. Many customers have opted to cancel their Suddenlink accounts in favor of Frontier Communications, which has much less expensive high-speed Internet prices. Sometimes that works out; sometimes it does not. It is however no secret that many Americans are “cutting the cord” with local cable companies and they are among one of the most unpopular businesses in survey after survey.
Fiber-optic Infrastructure has become as important as other public utilities such as gas, electricity, and water says the Biden Administration

Race Comm
Some people have suggested looking into a way that Race Communications, which provides broadband access to households at speeds of 1 gigabit per second download and 100 megabits upload in south Mono County, could play a role in providing at least some competition to Suddenlink. Race provides an all-fiber optic network with up to gigabyte speed at very affordable price. Maybe as or more important, they have 4.6 review ratings online for their service. By comparison, Suddenlink customer rating reviews tend to be far lower.
The federal government, as part of the infrastructure plan, wants to upgrade broadband, high-speed Internet service across the country at affordable rates.
The Internet has become as important to many households as other public utilities such as gas, electricity, and water. There is a significant amount of money being readied to make major improvements to the county’s high-speed infrastructure, but the question is, will current providers take that money and make promises to significantly improve services and prices, or will they, as they have in the past, take the money, and very little is changed?
Many local voters might be wondering if anything will come of this attempt by Roeser…and where are the other four district supervisors on this issue? You can ask them.
If you’d like to share your feedback with contact Jen Roeser, Inyo County 4th District Supervisor, contact her through email at [email protected] or visit her Facebook website, Jen Roeser Inyo County 4th District Supervisor.
Discover more from Sierra Wave: Eastern Sierra News - The Community's News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
It is sad to see a company that used to seem to care about their customer base go to complete dirt. Suddenlink made big improvements to their network when D395 was completed but seemed to stop caring a few years ago. Although my service has been reliable, the price seems to keep climbing. I recently moved and it was an absolute nightmare as I had to interact with their customer service center. Failed promised, missed appointment, horrible service. I vote to kick em out and let someone else take over the infrastructure and make some network improvement and have an actual customer service center.
In the Tri-Valleys there was no infrastructure. They tunneled and ran the fiber optic from Hwy. 6 to our community and to my house, just like the phone line, all underground. In those day we had Schat and it worked, a might slow, but now we have a great system. I may be wrong but I see it extremely expensive to run the fiberoptic through communities. I don’t know how it works but I would guess there has to be a user fee to use the poles. I’m sure it cost quite a bit to use them. If you want the 395 thing to work it was suppose to the County and towns need to set up a wireless Wi-Fi so that everyone can receive it like we do Netflix and such. Schat did it for the tri valley area.
All I know is they suck.
deja vu all over again.
Digital 395 was promised and billed as the publicly-funded broadband “highway” into the hinterlands of the Eastern Sierra
The bait being that its construction would make it profitable for private telecom to provide “last mile” broadband service to the public because they could connect to Digital 395’s fiberoptic infrastructure
The switch being that Digital 395 was never intended to provide high speed digital broadband service to “wee the people.”
Rather, Digital 395 was designed to provide broadband service primarily to the government agencies and bureaucrats who uncritically lobbied for and approved it and its poorly thought-out route.
So we’ll do it all over again.
Digital El Camino Sierra?
I believe your perspective would be different if you lived in an area of Mono County that is served by Race Communications. I’m not sure how Mono County got on the radar of Race and how Race was successful in acquiring the grant funds uses to complete the last mile and provide fiber directly to homes throughout Mono County, but here in southern Mono County, Race has been fantastic. The internet speeds (both download and upload) far surpass what people in large southern California cities can get and the price is comparable to what we were paying for Schat prior to Race coming into the community. Also in the 5 years that Race has been active here, it has not been down more than once or twice.
Instead of saying that Digital 395 is a bait and switch, I think you need to push on your local leaders to be proactive and partner with a company that is willing to complete the last mile. Relying on Suddenlink or Schat to improve their networks will result in disappointment since there is currently no incentive for them to do anything in Inyo County since there is no challenger.
Just my two cents.
Schools and county facilities directly benefited from connections to D395. But you’re just wrong to say the project was not intended to benefit everyone. We wouldn’t even be talking about last mile connections if not for the first mile (i.e. D395) And although I agree that Suddenlink is too expensive with lousy customer service, it signed onto D395 almost immediately and my service in Bishop improved dramatically. Maybe it was too long ago for people to remember. D395 is a fire hose of information. We just need to install some faucets along the way to spread the benefit.
“We just need to install some faucets along the way [i.e., Digital 395] to spread the benefit.”
Are you serious?
Because if it’s that easy to fix why is Supervisor Roeser spending her time whining to the PUC instead of working to install some more “faucets”?
Or is it SuddenLink’s responsibility to put in the faucets?
Why doesn’t the Digital 395 Cooperative do that Randy?
Why was no part of all the free Digital 395 money set aside for improvements i.e, like faucets?
The reality is that the route our elected officials selected (the ONLY route considered since no EIR was required and hence no alternatives proposed) put the “fire hose” of Digital 395 too far away from everything to make the installation of more faucets economically feasible.
But it’s a lot easier to blame the private sector – that actually provides service, however poorly – than a bunch of over-paid incompetent politicians and bureaucrats for thie Digital 395 debacle.
Only issue I have had with them is their “outsourced” tech support. Spent a week trying to explain what was wrong with their recent network change. My modem was showing up as being in Flagstaff and things did not work as they should -bank, amazon, credit cards, etc thought it was a hack and denied logins and transactions for a week. Having a person tell me that SHE knows more about networking than I do – having more than the 20 MS, Cisco, Sec+ certs and gave up on them.
Fun part is all the advertisements are geo-locating me to Arizona…. still after 3 months.
Inyo County is not a “one size fits all” kind of place for internet connectivity. Fiber optic is not economical for many communities and will not be installed in any remote areas. The county should look to, and work with, local Internet service providers first before inviting outside mega-corps to come in and just do the profitable parts of the task; leaving the rest undone.