From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Sent: Wednesday, March 22, 2006 2:46 PM
To: Leslie Greer
Cc: XXXXXXXXXXXX
Subject: Board Meeting



Mr. Greer

This email has to do with two subjects: 1) Internet service reliability and 2) rates for service.

I like many others have come to depend on the Internet, directly or indirectly, for my livelihood. This is due in no small part to the excellent job DTC has done promoting the use of the Internet and the various improvements over the years. Unfortunately, the service and rates don't live to expectations created.

I, along with Jim Joyner and Kim Bretegen, want to come to the next board meeting to discuss
the rates we pay for DSL access with DTC. Jim Joyner
is going to do the talking for us because it scares
the stuff out of me to do public speaking. I get so
flustered that I would never make any sense anyway.
I am a tech and hide in my house most of the time.


Here are some specifics:


DTC Rates:
With Bell South we can get Up to 1.5 Mbps UP
and 256 Kbps DOWN for $32.95 month.

With Charter Cable we can get up to
3Meg downloads / 256 kbps uploads
for $41.99 month.

We are paying $45.95 a month for 384 down / 128 up

Let me give you a scenario.

If I access a web page that takes 100K of bandwidth
to load on my computer, it does not take any more bandwidth
weather I have 384K or 3Meg download speed. All I get
for the extra money you charge is a little faster page loading.

It does not cost the Phone Company 1 cent more either way. I
am not using more bandwidth, just loading the page faster.
So I would like to ask that you consider adjusting the rates
to something more reasonable and competitive with the other
services in the area.

Problems with the Internet Service:

Here's the beef.
Just wanted to let you know about some things
with the internet access that have been a
problem for your users. At the bottom of this mail
I get technical in the hope that you will pass
this along to the techs. The info may help them
chase down the problems.

I regress: I was your 1st customer for
DSL and had ISDN before that. When we
got the DSL there was not a minutes
trouble in the 4 years (I think 4)
we had the original modem. Everything
worked great, I could not be happier.

About a month or so ago I was not able
to use the internet and called DTC.
The people were very helpful and the
response time was very good.
I told the tech that the problem was
in the switch and not in my modem.
He chose to change out my modem in any case.

Nice guy and very friendly, strickly professional,
I forget his name.

After installing the new modem there was still
no access to the internet. So he went to get
another modem thinking that the new modem was bad.
When he returned with another modem it was the same
case, still did not work. After some phone calls
and a trip to the CO he found the trouble was in
the switch. (I have been doing this a long time
but no one ever believes me.)
Ever since I had the new modem installed the
access times have been slow, NS lookups are
slow and at times things just stop for as
much as 3-4 hours at a time.

Over the past 10 days or so we have been
having problems with the Net access. The
worst times of the day is starting at approx.
4pm and continue until approx 8-10pm.
Same time every day.

The net access either stops altogether
or becomes so slow that it is not usable.

I use FTP quite a bit and the upload speed
is very slow all the time. 60Kbps or less


Name Server Lookups are very slow at times,
this makes the browser pause quite a while.
(Name server Lookups should be VERY FAST as
they take very little bandwidth.)

This is because the browser has to look up
the IP address of the domain before it can
complete the request for a site and actually
go there to get the data.

I believe there is some problem with the 1st
router/switch we are going through. The
IP: 10.3.30.253 times are way too high.
They should be in the range of <40 to 50ms
at the speed I have. (384K) It is my first hop
after a request leaves the DSL modem. Either
the bandwidth usage is too much for the pipe you
have or something is overloading the router/switch.