[Fair Use: For Education and Research Purpose Only]Local

LINK

ISP's woes continue

MONROE: Interruption to fledgling DSL service affects about 100 customers.

By Rich Newman The Times Herald-Record (NY, I think...darned if I can find it on their web page. :-/)

Anthony Grillo, owner of Command Computing, is one of Frontier Communication's first DSL customers in Monroe, and there was a problem right off the bat.

Grillo paid $250 to have the service installed yesterday but was told he couldn't use it yet due to technical problems. He shrugged it off.

"I'm in the industry," he said. "I know how things can go wrong." The Rochester-based company's DSL service shut down yesterday morning while upgrades to network equipment were made.

Customers in areas of New York state and Minnesota were affected, according to Tor Constantino, company spokesperson.

But Frontier's Monroe office wasn't expecting it, according to Joyce Stoeberl, general manager.

This latest Frontier Internet service interruption comes on the heels of a 12-hour loss Wednesday of Internet and long distance service for thousands, when a homeless man's campfire melted a fiber optic cable in Rochester.

Most of the affected customers were in the Rochester area, but included some of the more than 17,000 Frontier Internet subscribers in Orange and Ulster counties. Yesterday's problems were unrelated, according to Constantino. "This was an upgrade we were totally unaware of," Stoeberl said, "and we are not happy about it."

The service will cost Grillo $65 a month, including the required subscription to Frontier's Internet service . Once it's up and running, DSL will allow him to dramatically reduce the time it takes to work with Web pages, cutting to 10 minutes, for example, what typically takes him two hours to complete . Another subscriber in Monroe, who does some day trading, was less forgiving yesterday. He said yesterday he had been down three days, ever since the fire.

"I called and they said let's see if I can get a credit," he said. "I can't believe this."

===============================

-- Dee (T1Colt556@aol.com), February 27, 2000