When Excite@Home shut down its Internet service last week, Adelphia was ahead of its cable industry competitors in making sure customers didn't lose their cable-modem Internet access for long. Most Adelphia customers suffered only a short disruption in their Internet service.
About 7,500 Springs residents get high-speed Internet access from Adelphia through their cable television line. The service was actually provided through Excite under a deal Century Communications Corp. made before it was acquired by Adelphia in 1999.
Adelphia, a nationwide firm based in Pennsylvania, began planning for the worst in August when Excite sought U.S. Bankruptcy Court protection from its creditors. Adelphia already operated its own Internet service called Power Link, so it began developing detailed plans to move its Excite customers over to it.
AT&T Corp., which owns 23 percent of Excite, bid $307 million to acquire the rest of the company, but creditors protested that they wanted more. They won a ruling last month to cut off Excite service to AT&T's 850,000 customers, including many in the Denver and Boulder areas whose cable provider is AT&T Broadband.
Those customers now have to wait up to three weeks to get reconnected by AT&T. In today's get-it-done-today culture, three weeks without the Internet is an eternity - especially in a home with children. You have to assume that anyone affected would sign up with a competing high-speed Internet service, either though satellite TV or telephone companies.
Admittedly, Adelphia's switchover wasn't flawless - it mailed customers the wrong software needed to connect to Power Link. That meant customers either had to download the correct software themselves from the Web (hard to do when your service provider has gone down), or pick up a new CD with the correct software at Adelphia's office.
But Adelphia extended its local office hours every night last week for customers who needed to pick up the CD. The company also put its entire 35-person Power Link technical support staff on standby to immediately respond to customers who needed assistance.
This is not to say that Adelphia is perfect. Customers sometimes must endure lengthy waits to reach customer service personnel. The company also will anger customers next month by shuffling its cable TV channel lineup for the second time in less than a year.
But remember, in Colorado Springs, Adelphia has no real competition for cable TV, because satellite TV providers have yet to offer local channels.
The difference in Internet service, on the other hand, stems directly from competition. Here, Adelphia is hardly the only game in town, so offering quality service is essential to keeping customers.
Let's hope that with the company's other products - long-distance telephone service, paging and eventually local phone service - competition will make customer service as critical a priority.
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