Wednesday, June 30, 2010
 
sponsored by

Comcast pitches phone service for City Hall

Send a link to a friend

[June 30, 2010]  During the June 15 workshop meeting of the Lincoln City Council, Alderwoman Joni Tibbs said that she had been in some discussion with representatives from Comcast about switching the phone service at City Hall to that company from the current providers.

HardwareCurrently the city has Verizon as a service provider and uses other providers for the long-distance service in the building.

Tibbs on that night asked city attorney Bill Bates if he had reviewed the contract she had given him, and he said that he had. However, he also said that the contract had a reference to a website, and he had not had a chance to look at the information provided there.

This week, Tibbs called a meeting of the building and grounds committee, which she chairs, for the purpose of discussing this possible change in service.

At the beginning of the meeting, Tibbs asked Bates if he had researched the information from the Comcast website, and he said that he had.

"I wouldn't sign it for all the money in the world," Bates said. "There are a lot of disclaimers about they're selling you phone service, they are selling you Internet service, but they have no responsibility if it doesn't work."

Bates said that he could go into detail on all the things he doesn't like about the contract, but it would do no good because Comcast isn't going to change any of it.

Lisa Harding, the local sales representative for Comcast, was in the room to field questions and comment on the services the company hopes to provide to the city.

She began by telling the council that there was a 30-day out for the city as a new customer. She said that she felt that within 30 days the city should be able to know whether or not the service is going to work for them, and if it doesn't, they can back out of the contract with no penalties.

She said that the service was reliable, but if it did go down, the switches for the city would not be in Lincoln. If the phones would go down, city officials could call a Schaumberg office and have their office phone calls forwarded to their cell phones.

Harding also told the group that business customers, which is what the city would be, always come first during outages and that Comcast's response time is under four hours for their business customers.

When Harding invited questions, Alderman Tom O'Donohue asked how many other municipalities Comcast was providing phone service to. She answered that currently the company is not equipped for larger cities such as Springfield, but they have done a phone system for Mount Zion.

Alderman David Wilmert said that he would want to see the overall network design of the system, and he asked if the phone service was public or private.

Harding said that it was a private system, not like Vonage, which offers phone service via the Internet. She described the Comcast package as fiber optic that runs through the same lines as Internet but is isolated from that service.

She also said that if the city goes with Comcast, Lincoln Land Communications will actually be the ones to service the phone system. She said that Comcast would install their box and that LLC would take it from there.

Tibbs said that she was looking at the prospects of changing only a few lines over to Comcast. Her reasoning was that if Comcast did go down, there would still be working phones in the building via Verizon. She said that she was looking at the phones that generate the most long-distance calls and considering switching only those to Comcast.

She identified the largest users of long-distance as being the zoning office, the clerk's office fax line and the mayor's phone, and she said she had a detail of the expenditure if anyone wanted to see it.

[to top of second column]

Bates questioned whether or not that arrangement was possible, and Harding said that, yes, it was, but there are a couple of restrictions.

If the number dialed is supposed to ring into one line and that line is busy, the call is automatically rolled over to the next line and the next until it finds one that is not busy. Harding referred to this as "hunting" and said that the Comcast lines will only hunt their own lines; they will not hunt a Verizon line.

Tibbs also said that she was very concerned about failure and had asked Harding to talk about what would happen if the phones did go down.

Harding said that businesses have a special phone number they can call to report outages. It is a number that is not given out to residential customers.

Mayor Keith Snyder asked if there was an emergency plan in writing from Comcast. He said he wanted to know if there was some kind of priority restoration center created so that the city could get critical lines up quickly.

Harding said again that businesses get priority and that the company has a record of getting those systems back up and running within four hours. She also reminded them again that the switches for the phones will not be in Lincoln, so during a disaster, the city administration could call and have city hall calls forwarded to cell phones.

Snyder asked about getting out of the contract and was told that after the first 30 days the city would be locked into the contract. Harding said the contract could be either two years or three, but once the first 30 days had expired, breaking the contract would mean that the city would pay 75 percent of the charges that would have been generated through the remainder of the contract.

As the meeting began to wrap up, Tibbs said that she wanted Harding to do some homework and come back prepared to answer the questions she had been asked.

Bates said that before they ended the meeting he had a couple of questions for Harding.

He noted language in the 15-page document he retrieved from the Internet that said there were certain limitations on 911 and Enhanced 911 services. He said the contract specifies that the customer "acknowledges and accepts" the limitations on 911 and E-911. He told Harding that he didn't know what the paragraph actually means. She said she would have to find out and get back to him.

He also noted that the contract states that at the end of the first term, it will automatically renew in one-year increments unless Comcast is notified 30 days prior to the contract expiration.

Harding said that actually once the initial period of the contract is past, then the account would go to a month-to-month basis. She went on to say that she had not gone through the contract with a fine-tooth comb, but that she had never in her five years with Comcast written a renewal contract.

Bates replied, "I'm just telling you what your contract says."

With that, Tibbs called for a motion to adjourn the meeting so the council could commence their regular committee-of-the-whole workshop session.

[By NILA SMITH]

< Top Stories index

Back to top


 

News | Sports | Business | Rural Review | Teaching and Learning | Home and Family | Tourism | Obituaries

Community | Perspectives | Law and Courts | Leisure Time | Spiritual Life | Health and Fitness | Teen Scene
Calendar | Letters to the Editor