[Editor's Note: Continuing his discussion of broadband in Seattle, TechNerd Glenn Fleishman interviews broadband company Broadstripe's new Northwest GM, David Irons.
Previously TechNerd interviewed then-mayoral-candidate Mike McGinn about McGinn's pledge to bring municipal broadband to Seattle. As a follow-up, TechNerd interviewed Bill Schrier, the city's Chief Technology Officer about the possibilities of a muni system.
And after the election, Glenn filed this piece about McGinn's plans.
Last week, Glenn talked with Irons.]
The folks who live in Beacon Hill, the Central District, and downtown Seattle—not to mention my uncle in Port Townsend—think Broadstripe’s cable and broadband service sucks. Given an opportunity, residents go on at great length about outages, poor service, terrible bandwidth, and other issues.
David Irons agrees. That might not seem odd for a former King County council member who is used to fielding citizen complaints—except that Irons is now the Pacific Northwest’s general manager for Broadstripe. Irons joined the company about nine weeks ago, and in an interview with PubliCola last week he laid out about a dozen different improvements he’s brought to bear since he joined up.
Irons has moved in and out of politics and business, working in cable and technology fields, and running unsuccessfully for King County Executive in 2005 and the county’s director of elections position in 2009. Irons is known as a scrapper, for good or ill, and he seems to be bringing his energy to bear on Broadstripe’s operation.
He agreed frankly that Broadstripe’s service in Seattle from many angles didn’t measure up, and he believes that he can change that. Irons told me that he only accepted the job after negotiating enough authority (and budget) to make sure he could bring operations up to what was needed.
“I’ve been given the support, both financially to turn this around, and with the ability in staff and policies” to make changes.
For starters, Irons says that since he arrived, he prioritized upgrading the neighborhood nodes that feed cable service. Modern cable comprises fiber-optic links to neighborhood distribution points, from which coaxial cable lines run. Fiber can carry a vast amount of bandwidth with essentially no loss in quality over long distances; coaxial has a very high capacity, but many factors can interfere with clean analog cable TV and digital TV and broadband.
Of the 23 nodes in Seattle, “We have made significant electronic improvement to resolve the issues in 18 of them,” with the rest proving more problematic and requiring new cable runs or other changes. Irons said the remaining five nodes will be improved between February and March 2010.
Broadstripe customers “will see a dramatic improvement in the quality of service,” especially Internet, he says.
Irons also worked to revise how customer and technical support is handled by phone, and on service calls. The work force was, he said rather frankly, demoralized when he arrived. Trucks were out of service and took long periods to repair. Even such basics as uniform shirts for new hires weren’t being given out.
That has something to do with the company being in Chapter 11 bankruptcy for reorganization, which the firm is expected to emerge from in the first quarter of 2010 with new financing.
Irons explains, “Just on a routine basis, we had our technicians going out and arriving at someone’s home, okay, you have a problem there,” then checking it off and leaving. Now, a technician “is not allowed to leave the person’s home until the problem is resolved, or they have permission from their supervisor.”
Further, Irons has contracted with a firm that mails a postcard following every installation or service call with a picture of the technician, and a post-paid satisfaction card. Irons said he’s constantly handing out his own email address and cell phone number, and has gone on customer service calls where a subscriber is particularly unhappy.
To help boost knowledge in the field and on the phones, Irons has run the staff through a technical training refresher course, and fired some people. He says most of the staff seems to be taking to his changes, but “I have 8 open positions here.”
Customer service hours have been extended from 7 pm Pacific on weekdays to 9 pm Pacific, and in January that will go to 10 pm Pacific. Weekend customer support has been replaced with full-on tech support, with staff that can handle both billing and technical questions. Engineers are now on call for major problems 24 hours a day, as well.
All of what Irons describes costs money, although improving staff morale and reducing customer defections (and pure unhappiness) increases efficiency and revenue. Capital spending will be higher in 2010, as well.
Irons insists he has the financial support and Broadstripe should be able to deliver “up to” 15 Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream on its broadband service, the same as Comcast’s entry-level offering. He said the “up to” varies depending on a lot of factors—I’ve seen this on my Comcast service—but he’s working on making sure that few of the factors relate to his company’s network.
The biggest thing that Irons sys still remains outstanding is the connection the home. Seattle recently rated Broadstripe quite high on network quality, but poorly on home connections, where all the i’s and t’s weren’t dotted and crossed, and some of that can relate to specific service in a home.
I thought mayor elect Mike McGinn’s interest in municipally built fiber-to-the-home service would alarm Broadstripe, but Irons views it as an opportunity, because his firm could bid on either contracting to build and install the infrastructure and provide service as a retail brand to customers.
I recently met with a group long involved in advising the city on technology issues that’s passionately interested in getting FTTH running here, and they were all very clear that the preferable path wasn’t that Seattle become a service provider, but that Seattle facilitate building the infrastructure and then wholesaling to companies that would be have unique offerings over the network, and be the retail brand. That could include cable operators like Comcast and Broadstripe, and even telcoms like AT&T and Verizon who could offer cable programming, Internet telephony, and broadband.
Irons says that one of his remaining problems is that subscribers had gotten so use to getting problems resolved slowly, that the firm doesn’t always get reports of outages quickly. He said an outage in eastern King County went on for 2 1/2 days because only one call in an area with 250 subscribers came in; the rest of the subscribers didn’t even bother to report that they couldn’t get cable service.
“I was horrified,” Irons admits. “I now changed the policy: If one person calls up and says my cable is out, that is now a direct escalation,” calling the report an outage. “We have to show the customers we care, and things have changed.”
After Irons heard from a number of people in Central Seattle about problems, he said, well, let’s get together; he held a meeting on Saturday as an open forum in the neighborhood.
All Irons’s changes have occurred over the short period of time in which I started writing about issues in Beacon Hill and the CD, which also include poor infrastructure from Qwest, which can’t seem to deliver any reasonable speed DSL into the neighborhood.
I’d love to hear feedback from residents: Have you seen improvements in the last two months? If not, approximately where do you live? If Irons is going to live up to his promises, he’ll want to know, so he can take action.
