I, too, was cut off from Chaska.net after many months of working with their tech help to keep the service, well, servicable. As it turned out, an antenna was moved a block farther away from my home and the only way I could get a signal was to plug in my bridge into an outdoor power outlet; not very handy. Yes, the antenna was finally moved back to its original location, but about 2 months later. I was long gone by that time.

The sad part is we were all pretty excited about this new technology and now, by the time they get it working reliably, the technology may be obsolete. Wi-Max is on the horizon, new DSL schemes, cable offerings and even media content and internet may be distributed through the power grid. I fear but would not be surprised to see a Chaska.net surcharge on my tax statement should the subscriber base shrink below break-even numbers.

Here is a copy of the letter I wrote to Brad Mayer after I signed up with Sprint DSL:

March 28, 2006

Brad Mayer
Information Services Manger

Brad

The reason I returned my wireless bridge and cancelled my chaska.net service was ultimately because you "cancelled" me.

I don't think I was being unreasonable or setting my expectation level too high. As one of the pioneer early-users of your residential wireless service, I understood completely that new technology experiences a few bumps in the road during its startup phase. As a customer service specialist in my former occupation, I remained patient and spent considerable time with your tech people to optimize my chaska.net connection and reliability. It was working fairly well two weeks ago.

I had been promoting chaska.net to my friends and neighbors, reassuring them that the bugs would be worked out of this cutting-edge technology and that they would soon appreciate the high-speed connection and reliability, while still being able to make and receive telephone calls as they normally would. While I wouldn't call myself a chaska.net crusader, I bought into the community connection and spoke highly of the value it offered.

I agreed with your decision to upgrade the network, increasing the speed and reliability of your product and was excited when the day came for my own neighborhood. From the explanation on my home page, I was expecting an "occasional outage" and perhaps some slowdowns until "the entire network was re-optimized." What I received, however, was the discontinuation of my service by chaska.net itself.

On Tuesday, March 21, after nearly two hours total on the phone with your help desk and two trips to city hall to exchange equipment that had been perfectly servicable two days previously, my service was still not operational. It's not that it was slow or sporadic, the WLAN light did not even come on, even when moving it upstairs next to a window. As it was only (?) the day after my "upgrade" I waited for your tech people to fix whatever was broken, but my aggravation was compounded by the fact that I had planned to use that day on the internet to job search and send resumes.

By Wednesday afternoon, the third DAY of my upgrade, my service still had not been restored. Your customer service people could not estimate when the service would be restored as "they are still in the process of upgrading the rest of the city." Not really wanting to wait another week, I asked them to contact you, requesting a call from you so I could explain to you directly what had happened to my service. I asked for a credit for the hassle-factor and non-operation of my service and was told to call the business office. I called the business office and was told credits were not issued unless the customer discontinued the service. I did not get a call from anyone from your office Wednesday afternoon or evening.

On Thursday at 1:00 p.m., DAY FOUR of the "upgrade," I was still without service and received no calls to either my home phone or cell phone from your office. It was at that time I called Sprint, signed up for DSL service and made another trip to city hall to return the equipment which I had once spoken of so highly.

Brad, if your phone company promised you better service or more features after a possible "occasional outage" but ultimately your phone didn't work at all, wouldn't you agree that your phone company did not meet your expectation of good, reliable service? I don't think I'm the one who is being unreasonable. If I had tried chaska.net and found it to not work at my home or in my neighborhood it would be a different story, but I was a charter member and you cut me off.

From your own web page:

"The final part of Chaska.net's reliability puzzle comes in the form of SLA agreements with KMC Telecom, Origix Communications, 3Com Corporation, and Cisco Systems. These agreements range from 100% up time guarantees to on-site service within 4 hours giving us the ability to quickly access high level repair centers in the event of equipment failure."

"We also stock a number of "hot spares" which allow us to instantly replace a failed component or equipment. All of this rolled into Chaska.net allows us to provide Internet services with capacity and reliability at the forefront of our efforts."

"Reliable and Secure - Better than 99.9% uptime."

But from your homepage link to a CNN.com article:

"Derek Kerton, founder of the wireless consulting firm The Kerton Group questions the cities' capabilities for ongoing maintenance of such a high-tech service.

'The access point that covers your house is down -- how long will it take the city to get out there and fix it? Or will they complain they don't have the budget to fix it?'

Ultimately, widespread municipal Wi-Fi projects will fail, Kerton believes, as residents quickly demand new technology down the road."

He failed to mention poor customer service and unmet expectations.

Good luck with your network and I sincerely hope that your upgrade payback will be on schedule.

Name withheld
Chaska

I live directly across the street from an antenna and can always connect to the network, but cannot actually get to the WWW. I'd say I can actually use the Internet about 10% of the time. Most of my neighbors have dropped the service because it was so unreliable. I'm glad some people can get good service, but chaska.net definitely should not be heralded as any kind of success story.

The city of Chaska should definitely push for some accountability. After all, their name is attached to the company.