TelCo's take petty to a whole new level

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It all started with a fiber project...

As I have mentioned before, I am the Director of Technology for a small public school district. Over a year ago we decided to do a new fiber build out to our bus garage that sits about a mile or less away from our main campus.

This project would allow the garage to be part of our main network thus giving several benefits:

• Content filtering and firewall protection on the machines at that facility
• Eliminate the DSL connection we were currently using
• Managed enterprise wireless for the facility
• Elimination of phone lines by transitioning to our VoIP system
• File backup and storage on the server
• Additional benefits of being "domain joined"

We decided to leverage the Federal FCC/USAC E-rate program to offset the costs of our project. Basically it is a federal grant program that is based on your number of free and reduced lunch eligible students. Our numbers give us an 80% discount on all projects.

Only being required to pay 20% of a fiber build out is a definite plus!

Sadly, that discount comes at a cost and it is all mainly due to one specific telecommunications company.

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As I said, over a year ago we went out to bid. I think we got about five replies to the request for proposal (RFP). The E-Rate rules state that cost needs to be your single largest factor in making a decision. They do stipulate that transition issues can also be taken into account. So if your preferred vendor is a little more expensive and you know moving from them to a different vendor is going to be a headache, you can select your existing vendor even though it wasn't the lowest price.

In our case, the selected vendor was the lowest price and they have a good reputation to boot.

We were given bids for aerial and underground fiber. Due to the increased cost of underground fiber, we went the aerial route.

It is now close to a year from the initial start of the project and we still don't have fiber running to our bus garage.

As I mentioned, one specific company has made this whole process a nightmare.

I won't name names, but I believe they have a national footprint in various regions of the US. The first road block was the fact that two of their utility poles are on the fiber route to the garage.

They refused to let us connect to them.

Apparently they do not allow non-profits to connect to their poles. That excuse seems a little sus to me, but okay, whatever. They were more than happy to let us lease their fiber or sell us alternative solutions to connect to our bus garage... We declined.

Our fiber consultant got around that by going underground and by-passing those two poles. Apparently, they didn't like that because now the project is being held up by the same company taking their sweet time to move their connections on the remaining poles to make room for ours.

I have a feeling what should have been a fairly simple fiber run over a short distance is going to end up taking several years to complete.

I am pretty sure the teleco knows that as soon as we have that fiber connection we are going to cancel our $50 per month phone line and $150 per month DSL connection we have through them.

Remember I said petty? $2400 per year. They are acting like children over $2400 per year!

Devil's advocate, the company did take quite a hit when we moved to our current VoIP system and stopped paying about $60,000 per year into their coffers just from our landlines alone.

My opinion is they had every opportunity to initially give us a competitive bid. They failed, they should have tried harder... End of story.

I look forward to having this whole project behind me and moving forward. At this rate I might be retired first!

I have a feeling the company knows that as soon as we get this fiber up and

Posted with STEMGeeks