By DAVE HAMRICK
Staff Writer

Fayette County has notified MediaOne that the cable company “is not in compliance with the terms and conditions of the current franchise agreement.”

Approval of the pending transfer of that agreement to communications giant AT&T, which is in the process of acquiring MediaOne, is in jeopardy, said assistant county manager Chris Cofty in a July 30 letter to the company.

MediaOne is not maintaining its current equipment, is not moving quickly to upgrade that equipment, and “is in violation of both article 12.2 of the franchise and standards set by the Federal Communications Commission regarding customer service standards,” said Cofty's letter.

Copies of the letter were sent to AT&T, Cofty told The Citizen this week.

MediaOne representatives have until Sept. 3 to respond to the concerns raised in the letter, said Cofty, adding that the firm has promised to begin its answer by mail this week.

Customer service is the biggest problem, said Cofty, who worked for MediaOne before joining Fayette County. He held up a file folder filled with complaint letters an inch thick. By contrast, he opened a similar folder with complaint letters concerning Intermedia Cable, which serves some parts of Fayette. The Intermedia folder for the same time period held only two complaints.

“We get eight to ten calls a day pertaining to MediaOne,” he said. “I talk to more MediaOne customers now than I did when I worked there.”

Most of the residents who phone his office to complain about cable service say virtually the same thing, said Cofty. They lose service often and for long periods of time, and when they phone MediaOne's customer service phone number, they are put on hold for a half hour or longer, and when they finally reach a representative, they are dealt with rudely.

“I had one guy come in here,” said Cofty, “and sit down and tell me that he was on hold for 16 minutes the first time he called and then disconnected. He called again and was on hold 27 minutes and was disconnected. On the third attempt he got through in just eight minutes, but the person he spoke with told him with a very condescending attitude that he couldn't get credit for the outage because he didn't report it when it happened.

“How could he report it when he couldn't get through?” Cofty wanted to know.

But the root of the problem is in maintenance of the system, Cofty said. “If they had a more reliable system, our customers wouldn't have to get through to customer service,” he said.

In his letter to MediaOne, Cofty demanded that the company prove that it is maintaining Fayette's system. “Fayette County would like to send a representative with MediaOne personnel out to verify functionality of all stand by power supplies in Fayette County and request a copy of a map indicating placement of these stand by power supplies,” he wrote.

He also asked for a copy of the company's maintenance log pertaining to stand by power supples from June 1, 1998 to July 28, 1999, along with other maintenance records. The county's franchise agreement with MediaOne requires that those records be produced.

Stand by power supplies are a key to many of the complaints, Cofty said. Many customers say that they have electrical power but no cable service. But if stand by power supplies aren't working properly, he said, a customer in one part of the county can lose cable service because of a power outage in another area.

“They're in a reactive mode more than a preventive mode,” Cofty said. “You don't get the kind of complaints we get when there's not a problem.”

In recent interviews, company officials have told The Citizen that they are working to solve both the maintenance and customer service problems in Fayette. The final solution to the maintenance problem is to replace Fayette's antiquated coaxial cable lines and supporting equipment with a state-of-the-art fiber optic system, said public information officer Reg Griffin.

That's supposed to happen over the next year. The county's franchise agreement requires the firm to replace the system by Dec. 31, 2000, and Griffin said the company will do better than that, finishing by around September 2000.

The Citizen offered MediaOne officials an opportunity to respond to this story, but as of deadline spokesmen had not done so.