John, a Cruzio staffer, took this photo of an actual customer site.
First, be assured that if you haven’t been contacted, you are not affected by the end of these services.
If you are a subscriber to the small number of affected connections, we’ve already sent you email and snail mail letting you know there are only a few months of service left. We’re helping people find alternatives. We’re comping free email service. We’re sometimes sharing a few tears!
What’s happened is that we’re in a race. Cruzio needs to build our own infrastructure around the county to provide service to our community before AT&T decommissions the copper phone lines our older services use.
We’ve been part of an effort to force telephone companies to maintain their lines longer than they wish, and we’ve had some success, though we’ve lost money on the services for years. But some of the longest, oldest infrastructure has been failing. And, reluctantly, service on those lines has deteriorated so badly we will have to let a small number of our accounts go.
More details:
When we build our independent network, we build a solid foundation for the future. Our fiber and fixed wireless services are fast, reliable, and scalable. We’re very proud of our work.
In the past, all our customers were on lines leased from AT&T, built back when telephone companies were granted state monopolies in return for universal service and price regulation. We still have a lot of customers on leased lines where the service is reasonably good.
But in some parts of the county, on our oldest services (which we call DSL 1.5, or DSL 3.0, or DSL 6.0) we have seen a decline in line quality that, since we don’t own the wires, we can’t repair. Some customers lose service for weeks or even months before AT&T even sends a technician to look at their lines. We get distressed calls from our customers, and call AT&T in turn again and again, to no avail. It’s AT&T ‘s plan to drop those lines as soon as they’re allowed. We’ve already been warned that end-of-life on the leased network may come as early as this year. And they’re letting the lines deteriorate in the meantime.
We could no longer charge for such crummy service.
And, though we’re building as fast as we can, some of the places where the copper was deteriorating aren’t yet reachable by our newer network.
We emailed a small number of customers, some of them longtime customers, that their service would be discontinued. And it broke our hearts to do it.
Of course, when some parts of our network are discontinued, other people may hear rumors and think, “is that me, too?” Rest assured that if your service was being retired, you would get months of warning (we sent out emails in February for service cancels in June, and are following up with postal mail and phone calls for good measure).
Cruzio lost this race, and it was a tough loss. But we hope someday to reach every part of the county again. We’re building our independent network out rapidly, building 20 new Points of Presence (PoPs) around the county so far this year alone, each node serving up to hundreds of customers. We’re working hard to serve our county.
