Comments on: Truth Squad: Kansas City Star Drinks the Kool-Aid

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 09 May 2009 13:22:32 +0000

Yes Sunflower is in a unique position. I do believe the world company uses its power to keep its monopoly in place as much as possible.

As for freenet, it is not a municipal broadband service and I was not suggesting it was. However Josh Montgomery is always coming up with “creative” ways to get something done. I am a freenet subscriber as my main provider. I dont need a ton of bandwidth at home but I do expect a few things that Freenet seems to be having an increasingly difficult time providing. I don’t expect my service to be 100% reliable but I do expect a way to report when its down. I also expect my issue to be addressed inside of 24 hours. If your service goes out after business hours or on the weekend you can call and leave a message that apparently no one checks until normal business hours. You can also fill out an online form to notify them of problems after hours. Gee thats a great idea, if only it weren’t for the Internet not working I could get to that form. Whew! I have an iphone. Oh wait …. cant fill that form out on the iphone because you cant navigate to the submit button. Anyway over the past several months Freenets reliability has gotten pretty bad in my opinion.

I dont meant to rant on Freenet too much. I think the general idea is great, another place for competition. But Josh just doesn’t appear to be the person to make it happen.

Heres hoping for uverse soon!

By: Joshua Montgomery

Joshua Montgomery — Wed, 06 May 2009 19:28:08 +0000

Lawrence Freenet’s service provider, Community Wireless Communications Co. has applied for a franchise with Lawrence Kansas and is in the process of installing a fiber-optic backbone to facilitate both data and video services.

http://www.ci.lawrence.ks.us/web_based_agendas/2009/04-14-09/04-14-09h/cwc_franchise_agreement_request_04-08-09.pdf

The company is looking for financial partners to help make the project a success and already has commitments from several major players to buy services once the system is online.

The wireless mesh is only the beginning.

http://www.lawrencefreenet.org

By: Kevin Casey

Kevin Casey — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:36:48 +0000

To you folks in Scumflower land. These folks have a very small three county service area right? Here is what you all do. EVERYONE call up Scumplower & cancel EVERYTHING. How long do you think they will be in business if 90% of their customers go away? Now they will have a choice Drop this or file for bankruptcy.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 05 May 2009 23:39:20 +0000

Thanks for the article. My 60 yr oldmother in law got a huge Scumflower bill just a few months back. Poor lady watched a few Netflix movies. I guess that makes her a “bit torrent power user”. She of course just paid it like a tax. The question for me isn’t caps, it’s what Sunflower considers normal. I know at least %40 of my coworkers have switched to DSL. Many are on the Uverse waiting list (one bragged they got hooked up last week). When you have kids and they have xboxlive and YouTube does that make you a “poweruser”? Nope it makes you a plain old American. One Sunflower employee told me once “we don’t want the poweruser customer”. Well good on you Patrick & Rod, your definition of poweruser will soon constitute anyone who bought a camcorder or likes hulu (ie any 15 yr old). What will you do when they grow up ATT style and skip Sunflower? Poof bye bye userbase. The sad part is that Sundlower was once a forward thinking small business. Now they are drinking their own cool-aide and going to have to lay off employees so Patrick can tow the Trade Group party line. Sad kinda. PS I cancelled my Sunflower last week. I actually feel like I’m letting my community down going to ATT but Sunflowers response to my inquiry about caps never got answered (so much for Hometown Service). As a side note I love how they tell you the FCC makes them charge you for things (this is the answer I’ve gotten from a lot of folks there over the years). Also couldn’t tolerate hearing them lie to old people about “The Digital Conversion” (which of course was analog over the air but sunflower used it as an excuse to tell people they were being “forced” to make people rent set top boxes). I hate liars.

By: Phillip Dampier

Phillip Dampier — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:16:40 +0000

I wasn’t blaming Sunflower for it, but they are in a unique position to not have to face competition from an equivalent player in the market, so it’s real easy to throw a 50GB cap on everyone and charge outrageous overlimit fees to those exceeding it.

Free-net is supposed to be a 501(c)3 nonprofit, not a municipal broadband service. I didn’t think I alluded that local government was paying for it. It looks like it is sustained with subscriber revenue and contributions. Wi-fi is fine for portable computers, but I wouldn’t want to live with it for everything.

I think U-verse could change a lot in Lawrence, Kansas. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you guys!

By: Michael Chaney

Michael Chaney — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:27:26 +0000

In truth, people just expect more as time goes on. It’s just like when you bought that blazing fast 486 computer way back when. Then over time, as you got used to using it, it just “seemed” slower when in fact it was you just getting faster at using it or your programs getting more bloated.

In truth, the Internet is the same way. Over the last few years you may still just be surfing the Internet and checking email, but the apps are bigger, the ads are Flashier and you just got quicker at using your email. It “seemed” the Internet was slowing down, but really it was just web pages getting bigger and you becoming a power user.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:18:15 +0000

I have no love for Sunflower. The bandwidth limits are ridiculous. But to be fair its not sunflowers fault that the telco does not build out the DSL infrastructure to the country. Thats something you need to take up with the Telco. As far as freenet for kids, it was my understanding that the city didn’t co-sign a loan for freenet thats why that did not happen. They didn’t sign it not because of sunflowers pressure but because it would be illegal for them to do so.

That being said I would love to see another cable company in town. I think we could benefit from some competition. Luckily ATT is building out Uverse to Lawrence (at least I heard that). Uverse will allow us speeds up to 18M/s and iptv will be an option as well.

By: Joseph M. Jarvis

Joseph M. Jarvis — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:12:50 +0000

Nearly 1,000 people died at Jonestown. Don’t you think it’s a little tacky to perpetuate an idiom that makes light of such a tragic event?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jonestown.jpg

By: Lummox JR

Lummox JR — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:08:17 +0000

“Gradually it seemed to many consumers as if the Internet was slowing down. In truth, it just got busier.”

Wow. Not only is that a claim out of nowhere, it’s completely false. People’s Internet connections have been getting faster and faster for some time now. The only slowdowns occurred very early in the rollout of broadband service, and they were fixed with simple network upgrades. For the better part of a decade, the network’s ability to deliver high bandwidth has far outpaced the growth in usage. Those two sentences are nothing more than the reporter talking out of his butt because he can’t be bothered to do some research.

By: dave

dave — Tue, 05 May 2009 04:46:31 +0000

Thanks so much for giving this story national attention. I live in Lawrence and I know so many people victimized by Sunflower’s bandwidth limits. To add insult to injury people get dinged by “Phantom Bandwidth”–unexplained spikes of downloading that forces customers to pay overage fees. Without independent auditing, the customer is stuck. There is NO grace period and when you complain often the only option is a service call by Geeks on Wheels at $70. Most people just pay the overage fee as a Monopoly tax in a town where one company owns TV, Newspaper, and Cable.

There are hundreds of stories in this town of problems with Sunflower’s bandwidth caps restricting customers ability to use Netflix streaming or online backup services–which of course reduce revenue in other areas of the World Company.

Remember their caps are TOTAL internet usage…not just downloads. Three gig is the total bandwidth allowed on basic “Bronze” service. Then it’s a $2 a gig. This is so low it’s pathetic. Students opt for the teaser rate of $17.95 for Bronze then get hit with bills of over $50 because a professor put a lecture of on the web!

Fastest internet!?**—during peak times some people don’t even get 1/20th the advertised speed. Some quick googling and you’ll find people posting their actual speeds. I’ve got stats to back up my slow “gold” connection.

Please give this story national attention: we are drowning in bandwidth limits along with crappy service here. So goes Lawrence, so goes the nation. Help us stop the spread of this terrible business model.

Many DO NOT have a choice in this town–they live too far away for DSL or the city is too afraid to act counter to Sunflower’s interest. Freenet actually tried to establish FREE internet for children but Sunflower blocked offering free internet because it was counter to their interest.