AT&T Service Issues
By Ernie Parker
As of 2/25/2010

Here is the history of that equipment as it was explained to me by my contact at KCRT:

• Years ago, AT&T installed the hardware on the KCRT tower and set up a lease agreement with KCRT.
   
• When Cingular came into existence, they approached KCRT and gave them an ultimatum: either let Cingular do a buyout of the lease or they would terminate the contract.  KCRT accepted the buyout and Cingular set up a maintenance agreement with a third party (I haven't learned the name yet).
   
• AT&T bought Cingular and continues the same arrangement.  However, I was told they now renegotiate the maintenance contract every two years.

Here are the issues we face as I see them:

• I have yet to figure out the "right" way to tell AT&T that we have problems.  They don't seem to take the problem seriously unless we can point to multiple users that are having the problem.  Otherwise, they assume it's always the phone's fault.  I believe going forward we need to have a coordinated effort when reporting problems: communicate via the discussion forum that we are seeing problems and then have one or more people report the problem but they should have ALL of our phone numbers available to show that it is a multiple-user problem.
   
• We happen to be in the unfortunate situation that the only tower we can see is the one at Raton Pass (that may not be true for residents at the north end of the Ranch – they may get a signal from the tower located at mile-post 9.  That IS an AT&T-owned tower, which has a site ID of 36127 in case anybody needs to report a problem with that tower).  And the problem with the Raton Pass tower is its location: it happens to be located at the end of a horrible "road", if you can call it that.  It looks more like a trail and I've been told it can get some pretty bad ruts when it's wet.

It's the road that kept the maintenance company from coming out; they didn't even think they could navigate it.  And these repeated snows are not helping.

I hope the above makes things clearer.

For anyone that is interested, click here to see a picture that shows the tower and the path to reach it.  I made it up from 28 aerial photo panes from Microsoft's TerraServer.

Ernie