Suddenlink FYI

In the first verse of the popular child’s song, which we appropriated for the title of this post, the next line is “clap your hands.” In this case, we’re obviously not writing for children, and thus our request is a little different.

Instead of clapping your hands, we hope that — if you’re happy with Suddenlink broadband services — you’ll share your opinion by writing a review of our services at Broadband Reports or BBR, a prominent online forum for discussing and rating Internet service providers.

Like our peers and competitiors, Suddenlink has a presence at BBR, and the picture painted there of our company has been steadily improving over the course of the last year. That positive trend is the direct result of several things:

1. We finished our customer-impacting transition work in 2007, work that was required as we created one company from pieces of three.

2. We made a series of improvements to our local and national networks, enhancing the reliability and download speeds of our Internet service

3. We upped the ante on training programs for front-line employees throughout the organization. As is usually the case, more and better training resulted in better service.

4. We improved the overall value of our services by making the “triple play” of TV, Internet, and phone — and the associated savings of bundling those services together — available to the overwhelming majority of customers.

Granted, we still have room for improvement. We cannot rest on our laurels. To the contrary: We can and must continue to focus on enhancing the customer experience. That said, we also know the trends are headed in the right direction, as evidenced by internal customer surveys and the net growth in our business over the last year.

Accordingly, if you’re one of the happy customers, we hope you’ll take time to contribute a review at BBR. Blank review forms can be found here. And it’ll only take about 10 minutes of your time.

Thanks for considering this request.

Sixty years ago, the cable industry was born, and while there is some argument over precisely where that birth occured, a recent Multichannel News story notes that “the first published account” can be traced to a Nov. 18, 1948 article in a Tuckerman, Ark. newspaper. Today, Tuckerman is served by Suddenlink’s Newport, Ark., cable system.

From the Multichannel story:

In Tuckerman, Ark., population 2,000, appliance store owner James Y. “Jimmy” Davidson, and his sole employee, Louis French built a 100-foot-high tower on top of a two-story building and ran a coaxial cable down to television sets in his appliance store, where he successfully received test broadcasts from WMCT-TV, which was located over 100 miles away in Memphis, Tenn.

After WMCT-TV began fulltime transmission on Jan. 1, 1949, Davidson began looking for other locations for community antennas. After completing a system in Batesville, he began building other systems in Arkansas, financing each from the revenue generated from the others.

Davidson also founded a company, Davco that supplied equipment and expertise for would-be cable operators in Arkansas and other southern states.

A quarter-century later, in 1974, Davco and Mr. Davidson provided a young man from Newport his first job in cable. Today, that young man is Suddenlink’s MidSouth Region Vice President Randy Goad.

Though they were more than 2,600 miles from home, two Suddenlink customers from North Carolina discovered that good customer service knows no boundaries.

Traveling in Idaho, the husband and wife stopped at a coffee shop for refreshments and to check their email, when they encountered problems accessing their account. The wife happened to pick up an area tourist guide at the coffee shop and saw Suddenlink advertised as the local cable company.

She and her husband made their way to the Suddenlink office in Osburn, Idaho, where a customer-service rep helped them regain access to their email. The couple was elated and appreciative of the extra effort.

Drive 15 miles due north from Lake Tahoe 15 on State Route 89 – or about 100 miles northeast of Sacramento along Interstate 80 – and you’ll find Truckee, California, nestled in the heart of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, boasting some of the most breathtaking scenery, fastest ski slopes, and best golf courses anywhere in the Continental U.S.

Truckee traces its history to a Paiute Indian chief who helped thousands of people traveling west through Northern California in the mid-1800’s. The chief’s name apparently sounded like “Tro-kay” to emigrants, and they subsequently changed it to something that, presumably, was easier for them to pronounce.

Earlier this month, Suddenlink’s Lake Charles, La., team extended special honors to three teachers during Calcasieu Parish Teacher Appreciation Week — one aspect of the team’s longstanding involvement in the Partners in Education (PIE) program with area schools.

Pictured above (from left), the honored teachers include Cynthia Stewart, a computer-aided instruction lab manager, and Theresa Hardy, a pre-kindergarten teacher, both from J.J. Johnson Elementary School; and Rachel Taylor, a third-grade teacher from M.J. Kaufman Elementary School.

All three educators received recognition plaques and gift packages for Suddenlink services.

Suddenlink has completed a 957-mile fiber-ring project in western Texas. This project will enable an expanded slate of high-definition channels, video on demand (VOD), and other new services. Development of the fiber-ring started in late 2007, took six months to complete, and is believed to have been the largest fiber-construction project anywhere in North America last year.

The ring connects Suddenlink cable systems in the Texas markets of Abilene, Amarillo, Andrews, Big Spring, Floydada, Lubbock, Midland, Plainview, Post, San Angelo, Snyder, Sweetwater and Tulia, as well as Clovis, N.M.

Benefits of the project include:

- Additional capacity for current and new services
- Faster, more-economical deployment of new services
- Improved service quality
- Enhanced network redundancy to improve reliability

As a result of this project, Suddenlink has already added several new high-definition (HD) channels to line ups in the Abilene, Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland, and San Angelo cable systems, including: MHD (which features music programming from MTV, VH1, and CMT), TBS HD (home to Major League Baseball games on Sundays and the exclusive network for the four MLB Division Series and the American League Championship Series), and History Channel HD.

Though the company has been around since February 2003, the Suddenlink name was first announced in early May 2006 — around the same time we closed the acquisition of approximately 900,000 customers from Cox Communications, followed in July by the acquisition of approximately 240,000 customers from Charter Communications.

In those two years, Suddenlink has (among other things) migrated all operations to a common billing platform, dramatically expanded the availability of phone service, double or tripled Internet speeds in most areas, grown its customer base, and — most importantly of all — improved its performance in customer care.

There’s certainly more work to be done, but all Suddenlink employees can (and should) take great pride in what they’ve accomplished so far.

Happy second anniversary.

Approaching the nine-month mark before the digital transition, Suddenlink today alerted major newspapers across our service area about the information we are providing (online, in customer bills, etc.) regarding this transition.

We expect more local newspapers will be reporting on the subject in the weeks and months ahead, and for that reason, we wanted to make sure they know that Suddenlink customers will not have to worry about the digital transition, that we’ll take care of it for them.

Suddenlink and four other cable operators are asking the FCC to establish a “quiet period,” starting later this year and running through May of next year. The reason: To help avoid any confusion that might be created by the overlap of “retransmission consent” negotiations and the DTV transition.

We’ve already written here about the DTV transition. “Retransmission consent” is an artifact of a 1992 law and it essentially works this way:

If a TV station chooses to be a retransmission-consent station, cable operators must (per federal law) negotiate with the TV station for permission (consent) to carry that station’s signal on their cable systems.

If those negotiations break down, the TV station has the right to prohibit the cable operator from “retransmitting” its signal. If the cable operator is already carrying the TV station’s signal, the TV station can force the cable operator to drop that signal.

In recent years, this scenario has played itself out all-too-frequently. Regular readers of this blog may remember the situation Suddenlink faced with KXAN in the Austin TV market. And we’re certainly not alone.

Such issues could be further complicated later this year, when the five cable companies involved in this request face retransmission-consent negotiations covering more than eight million households. If even a portion of those negotiations break down, several million homes could be told they’re going to lose broadcast TV stations at the same time they’re being told they won’t lose those stations during the DTV transition.

The requested “quiet period” would prevent this potential confusion by requiring both the cable operators and the TV stations to maintain the status quo until May 2009, well after the digital transition should be completed.

And who exactly benefits from this scenario? The consumer.

Here’s hoping the FCC acts on the request in a timely manner.