By Nelson Schneider - 11/08/15 at 02:52 PM CT
It has been a month since Northeast Nebraska Telephone Company (NNTC) rescued me from the ISP tyranny of Windstream (delenda est). I have already written about the gory details of how I came to be a customer of NNTC, so today I’m going to focus on the quality of the company’s service. In a word: Euphoric.
During the process of getting a fiber optic line extended to my farm, NNTC executive, Terry Eriksen, told me the company would begin work on my fiber run on September 21, 2015. They did not actually begin working on that date… they started trenching and running the fiber two weeks before the 21st! I have never heard any anecdotes from anyone dealing with an ISP or teleco where the company starts doing service work early rather than ‘fashionably’ late. Due to their quick start, NNTC had the fiber run completed and ready to trench through my yard and hook up to the house by the 21st.
It just so happened to be raining lightly the day that NNTC showed up to run the fiber through my yard and into the wall of my office. All of the laborers and technicians who showed up were incredibly conscientious, both in asking for my input as to where to run the trench so it would to the least damage to the lawn and in taking off their muddy boots when entering my home. After the last bit of cable was buried, NNTC technician, Jack Fisher, installed the Ethernet jack and backup battery in my office wall, doing very little damage in the process.
I wasn’t expecting to be online that same day the line was installed. I expected to sit around and wait for a few days (maybe even a week) while a team of NNTC technicians went back to their local office and setup my connection. Again, it didn’t happen that way. Instead, another NNTC tech, Matt Muessigmann, joined Jack and myself in my basement office and explained the technical details of how to get my connection up and running (it’s a Dynamic connection instead of PPoE).
Matt, Jack, and I ran into a few problems, as it seemed that my account information hadn’t been setup in NNTC’s system (even though I had given the pertinent information to a member of the company’s administrative staff back in August). Instead of going home and leaving me hanging, these two techs stuck around, called the home office, and corrected the problems with my account information within an hour. It turned out that the person who took down my account info had sloppy handwriting – and apparently didn’t just enter it directly into a computer – so when it came time to transcribe my username and password, the ones that were entered for my account were not the ones I had specified. It was an easy fix, and once taken care of, I was online in a snap.
I pay NNTC $140/month for 25Mbps/25Mbps. This pricing plan is clean, with no hidden fees or other secret nonsense tacked-on after the fact. With Windstream, I paid $80/month for a bundle containing home phone, 1.5Mbps/384Kbps, and a bunch of fees and taxes. With Windstream, I NEVER got the speed I paid for, and was ‘happy’ to get 1.2Mbps/300Kbps. With NNTC, however, I am getting speeds around 28-30Mbps both directions. As the comment section showed in Jon Brodkins’ ArsTechnica.com article about my plight, there are plenty of obnoxious city slickers out there who think my connection is still slow, but at this speed, I am at least comparable to the ‘average’ cable connection in Lincoln, NE. I can’t expect to get gigabit connectivity from a small company like NNTC, despite the fact that Cox and CenturyLink are both pushing an excessive amount of TV commercials for such a service in Omaha, NE (of course, they never say how much it costs…). NNTC’s infrastructure is expandable to gigabit speeds, as it is the same fiber that every other teleco and ISP uses. It’s just a matter of demand, and right now, NNTC’s biggest demand is for 25/25Mbps symmetrical. Terry Eriksen has told me that the company will be offering faster packages in the future, and that I can expect my current package price to go down in the coming years. These are both pieces of good news, as it means my investment in improved Internet architecture won’t just be a flash in the pan that becomes obsolete before it’s even paid off.
During this past month of daily use, the amount of stress this fast connection to the Internet has taken off my shoulders is amazing. I no longer have to ration my bandwidth like the gruel server in Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” going all high-pitched and insane when a program, website, service, or update demands “moooooooooore?!” I’m finally getting to use the QoS (Quality of Service) features of my router, as with Windstream there wasn’t even enough S to Q. I love being able to let automatic updates just do their thing without worrying about a fully saturated pipe. Even downloads from Steam, which will run at 3.5MBps (whereas before they were 140KBps at best) if I let them will gradually slow down if I need bandwidth elsewhere and speed back up once I don’t. This is the way the modern Internet was meant to be experienced! It’s criminal that the Federal Government isn’t doing more to force broadband providers to expand the quality and scope of their services beyond the piddly 4Mbps download that meets the official definition of ‘broadband.’
Of course, every rose has its thorns, and NNTC is no different. The company’s sole weakness, as far as I can tell, is that their actual telephone service isn’t all that great. Because I didn’t go through the arduous, year-long task of filing a change of service area form with my local government, I still am ‘officially’ in Windstream’s telephone service area. Those evil, green bastards still get $50/month for the farm’s landline phone (which will change once I have some more time to chat up Verizon about their terrible service in the area and the possibility of getting a Home Phone Connect added to my current cellular plan). However, I looked at NNTC’s telephone offerings, and they are lacking all of the key features I would want in a landline – specifically long distance. NNTC has no unlimited nationwide long distance plan, and still use the obsolete-in-the-1990s idea of charging a per-minute fee for long distance calls. This is a massive problem for folks who live in NNTC’s Nebraska service area… because EVERYTHING is long distance from these rural locations. To top it off, a few years ago, Nebraska changed the way dialing works, so we always have to dial 1+ the area code before dialing the rest of the number, which can lead to plenty of unpleasant long distance surprises on a bill that doesn’t just take care of it all at once. However, once again, Terry Eriksen has told me that NNTC is looking into the possibility of adding unlimited long distance at some point in the future.
In sum, Northeast Nebraska Telephone Company is NOT like a typical ISP or teleco in any way. The executives, laborers, and technicians are extremely prompt, polite, and on the ball. There is never any stammering, deflection, or redirection from these folks: They just answer questions. The service itself is better than I could have ever imagined I could get at my rural location, and actually makes using the Internet fun again (provided you avoid the social networks and the trolls). I can’t recommend NNTC highly enough – they are simply a fantastic company that puts the customers first and manages to do well for themselves in the process. If I had my way, every Windstream, Sprint, AT&T, Verizon, Cox, CenturyLink, Comcast, Time-Warner, etc. would be torn apart and reduced to small, locally-serving providers that are actually culpable and responsive to their customers’ needs and wants. As Americans, we need to demand our government tear down the monopolies and duopolies in the telecommunications arena so that all Americans are treated equally once more. The small cooperative model employed by NNTC is the paradigm to be emulated.
