[Tfug] DakotaCom and Gain Merger

[Steven Bowers]

tonyh at engr.arizona.edu wrote:
 > I think nationwide may also own the company that took over the sprint
 > broadband stuff (thats what a river employee told me but I didn't 
confirm it independently).


I've refrained from this whole discussion since I work for Simply Bits 
and I did not feel it was appropriate to chime in since my opinions 
would be biased. However, on the subject of Sprint Broadband that is a 
different matter. I used to work for Sprint Broadband and I still have 
contacts there so I can tell you a little bit about how they have 
changed as well as a little bit about their decline.

Sprint sold its customer base to a company called Kite Networks. Sprint 
still owns the spectrum in which they operate, the tower sites and the 
network operations center. Customer and Technical support is now run by 
Kite Networks. All the employees were retained but their pay and 
benefits changed (those with Sprint cell service got shafted since they 
were no longer Sprint employees). The technical support staff, have had 
customer service and dispatch responsibilities added to their plate. In 
addition they are also responsible for providing support for the metro 
Tempe WiFi network (which as I understand it is a massive headache).

They had peaked at 50,000 customers at one point but then began to lose 
2% of their customers each month due to various problems. When I was 
laid off they had just dropped below 30,000 and were still losing 
customers. Personally I attribute their downfall to the outright lies 
they told customers and the poor decisions made by mgmt.

Sales staff told customers it would work for gaming and VoIP while tech 
support personnel in the next room were being told the exact opposite. 
We were told it would not support these functions because they did not 
have enough upstream bandwidth. Customers were sold on the premise that 
they had "up to 256Kb of bandwidth" yet internally we would only support 
up to 4Kb. That was later reduced to 1Kb and finally it denigrated to a 
point where we were told we don't support upstream speeds.

During their heyday the sales staff did a promo at Tucson Mall. As part 
of the demo they did some on-line gaming. That promo was rigged. They 
engineered a link back to the transmitter so that everything would work. 
That link was not typical of what customers were sold.

They had a problem with equipment that kept spontaneously rebooting. 
Sprint had blamed Hybrid (the manufacturer of the broadband router aka 
the Sprint modem) and claimed it was unfixable. It was not until the 
problem came to the attention of someone at Kite nearly five years after 
Sprint began that it got fixed. It was one line of code in a FreeBSD 
machine. Kite rewrote that line, added a little bit more RAM and POOF, 
problem solved!! Kite certainly deserves credit for that. Since that 
time they have managed to level off and are no longer losing 2% of their 
customers each month.

Sprint does NOT own the upstream bandwidth in which they operate. They 
had tried to convert customers in Tucson and Phoenix to something they 
called "in-band" which they placed upstream connectivity in the same 
spectrum as the downstream connection. However, it was never completed 
and only a very limited number of sectors have the capability for 
In-Band, and an even fewer customers have In-Band service.

They had a customer in Phoenix who lived so far out of town that he was 
outside the boundaries set by the FCC for our transmission range. This 
person had a clear line-of-sight back to the transmitter and could 
actually get a signal, though it was very marginal. One group within the 
company did not want to install service for him based on these issues. 
However, the customer made a real stink and the other group caved in to 
his demands. They told him we would install service but because he was 
so far away we would not support it if he had problems. He signed a 
document that said we would not roll a truck unless he had an equipment 
failure, that he could not call tech support for anything other than an 
equipment failure. He agreed to all of this and signed the waiver.

This person called nearly every day to bitch and complain about how poor 
his service was. He later tried to file a class-action lawsuit against 
Sprint.

A California customer got upset with us when his IP address changed. We 
tactfully reminded him that the IP was dynamic and belonged to Sprint. 
He faxed us a copy of his contract. His sales person had crossed out 
that whole paragraph about IP assignments and had hand written in the 
sidebar that he was guaranteed the IP that was assigned to him (the 
sales mgr even signed off on it). Two of our tech support staff spent 
hours manipulating a system to get the IP address re-assigned to him.

These are but a few anecdotal examples of the problems at Sprint. 
Initially I was not happy about being laid off. My anger grew worse when 
I learned that the person who made the selections did so based not on 
seniority or job performance, but on who she liked within the company. 
My anger turned to rage when I learned that certain persons had been 
reprimanded, and others suspended, just weeks before I was laid off. In 
retrospect it was just another example of how poorly managed Sprint 
truly was.

Without trumpting the Simply Bits horn too much I will say this. From 
the day I started at BB Labs to its acquisition by Simply Bits a year 
later I've always been told one thing consistently - "Tell customers the 
truth". There is a night and day difference between the mgmt of Sprint 
and that of Simply Bits. At least here at Simply Bits I consistently see 
the owners sweating their ass off up on a roof in the middle of summer 
to get a customer installed, or on a roof in the middle of the night to 
fix something. You would NEVER have seen that at Sprint.