Grace Leong

As many as 200 Mstar Metro customers on iProvo may be left out of an emergency transition to Broadweave Networks after a third-party provider to Mstar threatened to cut off phone services on the fiber-optic network on Friday, forcing Broadweave to scramble to take over those customers.

Buchanan declined to divulge how much Mstar owes NGT for phone services provided on iProvo.

"Services for all phone customers on the iProvo network are being turned off tonight [Friday night] at 7 p.m. MST due to a payment default by Mstar, and because NGT reached out proactively to the entity acquiring Mstar's customer base, but has been unable to come to new contract terms with it," she said. "Mstar customers on iProvo can continue to make emergency calls to 911 [and] receive inbound calls, but we will deactivate all outbound calling."

Jon Hansen, Mstar's interim president, disputed allegations that Mstar's phone services on iProvo were being terminated because of unpaid bills.

"We're not commenting on whether we owe money to NGT on iProvo," he said. "Whether NGT is going to be servicing those customers anymore is their matter with Broadweave. The iProvo customers are completing their transition to Broadweave, and our UTOPIA customers are not being transitioned. There's a technical transition taking place with iProvo customer service, and it has nothing to do with our contract or payments with NGT."

Emergency transition

Anticipating potential problems, Broadweave had already begun working on the transition to bring Mstar's phone customers to its fold several weeks ago.

"Broadweave knew that this potential threat was looming and was already in the process of getting the transition going," said Cheryl Snapp Conner, spokeswoman for Broadweave, citing information from Jon Webb, Broadweave's vice president of network operations.

"But we had to unfortunately step up our schedule to transition the 1,200 to 1,300 iProvo phone customers of Mstar immediately after Broadweave was told that service was being cut of as of Friday morning," Snapp Conner said.

The transition, which began on Wednesday, was supposed to have started after the sale of iProvo to Broadweave is finalized on June 30. All of Mstar's phone customers on iProvo became Broadweave's customers as of early Friday morning.

But the transition of Mstar's video and Internet customers on iProvo to Broadweave is expected to remain on schedule starting July 1. Once the iProvo sale is completed, Broadweave will become the sole service provider for around 13,500 residential and business customers of iProvo. That consists of 3,000 business customers of Veracity and an estimated 10,500 residential customers from Mstar and Nuvont Communications.

As far as notifying Mstar's phone customers of the emergency transition, there was little Broadweave could do beyond an e-mail notification, Snapp Conner said.

"To get the e-mail notification out by Thursday evening to the Mstar phone customers, and then have the service transition happen on Friday morning, that's why 100 to 200 customers may have had technical difficulties, which came upon them without much warning," she said.

Up to 200 Mstar phone customers on iProvo aren't registering as Broadweave customers yet, meaning they "haven't been transitioned seamlessly" to Broadweave's network, she said.

"Broadweave is making the transition via in-home premises equipment already in the iProvo customers' homes. They have already identified that some of that is inadequate and will be replacing those units. However, in cases where the equipment didn't automatically port itself over to Broadweave at the point of transition, it required calls from those customers to tech support in order to get their equipment service address onto the Broadweave network," she said.

So far, between 15 and 20 customers called Broadweave on Friday to notify them of the dropped phone service, which has since been restored to them, Snapp Connor said. "In total, between 100 and 200 customers' equipment didn't pull itself onto the Broadweave network, which means Broadweave needs to wait for calls from those customers in order to get them manually registered into the new system."

Affected customers should call Broadweave's hotline at 691-5800 to have their phone services restored, she said.

Upset customer

But unfortunately, Broadweave's preemptive move wasn't fast enough for Bill Lund, an Mstar phone, video and Internet customer, who said he lost his phone service as early as Wednesday afternoon -- and despite making calls to both Mstar and Broadweave's customer support in the past two days -- doesn't know when his service will be restored.

"Repeated calls to Mstar and Broadweave only resulted in finger pointing. And they won't give us any indication as to when we'll get our phone service back," Lund said. "I've already paid my bill for June, and when I asked Mstar about whether I'll be reimbursed, they told me to take it up with Broadweave. I feel like they're trying to wash their hands of the whole thing."

Lund, who started subscribing to Mstar's "triple-play" services on iProvo in May, said he made the switch from Comcast because iProvo offers much faster Internet access speeds.

"Comcast's download speed was 2 megabytes per second, and their upload speed is only about 256 Kb/s, but iProvo is offering 15 Mb/s for upload and download speeds, and that's what I need when I work from home," said Lund, who is an information technology officer with Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library.

"So far the Internet service on iProvo has lived up to my expectations, but the phone service has always been wretched," he said. "We get at least one outage every week. There are echoes on the phone line, and sometimes, my neighbors tell me they can hear my phone conversations when they pick up their phones."

But Buchanan was mystified as to why any of Mstar's phone customers have already lost service on iProvo.

"Until we turn off service at 7 p.m. MST [Friday], no one should have lost their service, unless they lost the actual network backbone, which means both their phone and Internet service would be down," she said.

Damage control

Broadweave CEO Steve Christensen said the company will "do everything in its power to make the customers happy, now that they are officially Broadweave's customers."

"We are committed to restoring service as soon as possible. Our technicians were up all night making sure the transition took place properly and didn't affect customers. We're fixing all those problems. We had to accelerate the process of the transition, and because it's our first day on the job, please allow us to do what we can to resolve those problems," he said.

"It's a complex process getting data like billing info and the customers' package info from Mstar and the third-party provider and processing it and integrating it in our system. We got a lot of cooperation from Mstar's technical and service operations staff to make sure there's a good transition."

Overall, Christensen and Hansen say the transition was successful because "less than 1 percent of their customer base" experienced technical service issues.

"We're sorry that a small number of customers have had some problems. We've made every attempt to notify customers by e-mail, left automated voice messages, and are in the process of sending out letters to them to discuss the transition immediately," Hansen said. "We didn't expect phone service to be down for some customers. In more than 99 percent of cases, their phone service isn't down. Once we transition over, what control do we have? Broadweave will take good care of those customers."

Possible sale?

Mstar's 2,300 phone customers, who are receiving services via NGT on UTOPIA, remain unaffected.

"In our negotiations with Mstar, it is our understanding that Mstar's phone customers on both iProvo and UTOPIA networks are being sold or on the verge of being sold. That means Mstar's phone customers on UTOPIA is or will be under different ownership. That's why we're continuing to provide phone services on UTOPIA," NGT's Buchanan said.

The UTOPIA official declined to comment on whether Mstar's phone customers on UTOPIA are being sold. There are a total of nearly 5,000 Mstar customers on UTOPIA, of which 1,400 are Internet-only subscribers, 1,250 video-only subscribers and 1,300 phone-only subscribers. In addition, there are 1,000 Mstar subscribers to all three services.

As for Lund, he is now contemplating returning to Comcast for cable TV services and to Qwest for phone services.

"My only option for the Internet speeds I need is iProvo, but I'm going to go with whoever gives the best services for video and phone," he said. "It's more expensive to do it that way, but what choice do I have?"