The city of Poplar Bluff just passed an ordinance that says a Megabit on their network costs $1051 when sold to an ISP.
Yes, that’s right, a business can purchase a 3Meg Cable Account from MyCityCable for $99/month (or $33 per Megabit), but when sold to an ISP, that 3 Megabits costs $3153.
AT&T charges ISPs and large businesses $22 per Megabit
Level3 charges $45 per Megabit in Poplar Bluff
Level3 charges $12.50 per Megabit in St Louis
The following was read by Brian Becker at the City Council Meeting on 7/19/2010:
My name is Brian Becker and I own and operate Poplar Bluff Internet, dba semo.net, at 1877 N Westwood Blvd.
This afternoon at the Municipal Utilities Advisory Board it was voted by the members to recommend to you this evening to end Open Access. This is all predicated on the false assumption that Open Access is costing the City money.
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The ordinance written shortly before 7pm was read and approved and became law tonight.
For the next 3 months, ISPs will pay the current rates (which were raised by City Council in January 2010)
For the following 12 months, ISPs rates will increase by 43% (semo.net’s rates were estimated to increase by over $8,500/month)
After 15 months, MyCityCable will be the only ISP on the Cable Network
Here are the financial numbers provided by Mr. Bach to the City Council and the Municipal Utilities Advisory Board showing how Mr. Bach calculated the new rates to be charged to the Open Access ISPs.
The following was read at the Poplar Bluff City Council meeting during Citizen Input on July 6th, 2010.
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My name is Brian Becker, I own Poplar Bluff Internet also known as semo.net. A month ago I stood before City Council asking for action. It’s now been 49 days of being prevented by City Cable to sign up new customers and in several instances over the past month, even lose the ones I already have.
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Our office will be closed on Sunday, July 4th and Monday, July 5th in observance of Independence Day. We will resume normal business hours on Tuesday, July 6th.
Have a happy and safe holiday!
One of the factors that sets our company apart is our support department. After each trouble ticket with our support team, our customer is sent a survey by email. I am constantly amazed at the number of high praises our team members get (not because they don’t deserve it but because human nature’s desire to be more vocal over frustrations one would expect frustration to dominate the responses).
Though we sometimes get frustrated responses, the overall majority are wonderful praise of our staff.
Over the past week, our team dealt with over 200 customer issues and 19 completed the survey for us. Below are the scores given in all 19 surveys and following that are the messages that accompanied the scores (there were no negative responses this week).
Ratings:
|
Jerry 2 Excellents 4 Goods |
Josh 2 Excellents 1 Good |
Justin 1 Good |
Stefan 4 Excellents 4 Goods |
Bill 1 Good |
Reviews:
| Bill/Jerry: 639729 I bought a new laptap, not able to log into my e-mail or internet. So took it to semo.net. It was fixed. Thank you. Stefan/Jerry: 696509 Josh: 697591 Stefan: 697702 Stefan: 697851 Jerry: 698113 Josh: 698271 Stefan: 698294 |
[Disclaimer: the following is solely the opinion and perspective of Brian Becker]
On May 14th, I was sent a letter from Bill Bach, General Manager of City Cable. The letter stated that my company was exceeding the 8meg bandwidth allotment per the 2001 city ordinance. For that reason, semo.net could not sign up new customers until a new rate was negotiated. Within hours I made a reasonable and fair offer for the overage so that our company could continue doing business and simultaneously work with the City Council to update the old ordinance. My offer was ignored.
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The office of semo.net will be closed Monday, May 31st in observance of Memorial Day. We will resume normal business hours on Tuesday, June 1st.
Come celebrate Cinco de Mayo at Tio’s on May 5th. They will have live music, great food, wonderful specials and amazing drinks including their famous Margarita!
Turn you hump day into a fiesta!!!!
Tio’s is located on Three Rivers Blvd just off of Kanell Blvd (PP Hwy) in Poplar Bluff.
Party starts when you walk in!
We are proud to inform you that we will be are moving our semo.net and
sheltonbbs.com email to a new mail platform as of Tuesday, April 27.
This new system offers many advancements and upgrades for our users,
including:
* state-of-the-art webmail
* free spam/virus filtering for all mailboxes
* filtered spam will be held in a “Spam” folder in your webmail
* optional SSL encryption
* optional IMAP access
* 2 gigabyte individual mailbox storage
* 25 megabyte maximum email size
All this is being added at no additional cost to you. If you have been
a user of our Postini spam filtering service, you will not be billed
again for the filtering, and your spam will be quarantined in the
semo.net webmail rather than the old Postini portal.
Due to the process of moving the email and migrating existing mailboxes
to the new service, you may experience a short delay in the delivery of
some messages, but no mail should be lost.
Some users may need to update their mail settings to log in to the new
mail. The new system requires that you log in using your entire email
address (for example, “gijoe@semo.net”) rather than just the first part
of the email address like our current service allows (i.e., “gijoe”). If
you need to update your settings, you can find instructions at:
http://blog.semo.net/2010/03/31/please-double-check-your-email-settings/
We are excited to offer this new service to you as we continue our
commitment to provide the best service, support and repair in Southeast
Missouri.