 Currently 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] |
