The Fremont City Council voted 4-0 Tuesday night to impose new requirements on ATT subsidiary Excite@Home (Nasdaq:ATHM), which provides the service to about 10,000 homes in the city of 200,000.
The council acted after months of complaints from subscribers, who pay $39.95 a month for connections that are four to six times faster than 56Kbps phone modems.
"Consumers were the ones who put this on the radar screen," Dan Schoenholz, Fremont's city administrative analyst, told ZDNN.
While some of the gripes focused on a slowdown in service, most were about the company's poor response to consumers.
"A number of users simply couldn't get online, or if they could, speeds were doggedly slow," says subscriber Dan Calic. "And to add further insult, when they tried to call the call center, people waited up to two hours to get through."
Rules of the game
The rules adopted by the council are similar to those for cable TV franchises:
Answer telephones without delay;
Fix service within 24 hours;
Install new service within two weeks;
Provide more payment options;
Penalties include fines of up to $9,000 every three months.
AT&T (NYSE:T) -- which inherited the franchise in its takeover of Tele-Communications Inc. earlier this year -- says it was an integral part of the process to develop the standards and welcomes them.
"One of the real values was the dialogue between the users and the company," says Schoenholz. "That may have just as much value in the future."
