Teaser: “Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?”

Key: AT&T

AT&T Service in Telluride Goes From Bad to Simply Horrendous

Editorial Slant

By Marta Tarbell

For those of us who have spent the better part of our telephone time over the holidays saying, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?” it’s no surprise to hear that AT&T service in Telluride is on the fritz.

AT&T customers are experiencing a preponderance of dropped calls, and having difficulty placing and receiving calls – and even texting – when our population swells, as it has for the Christmas-New Year’s holiday.

Relief is on the way, said company spokesperson Alex Carey in a telephone conversation Wednesday, although efforts to fix the towers “we inherited in the Alltel deal,” which officials had hoped would take effect prior to the holidays, have not yet come to fruition.

He blamed “the historic nature of the town and the location” for some of those problems, and said “reinforcements to the towers” and the technology would hopefully become manifest in January.

“It’s essentially a case of more traffic on the same highway,” Carey had said in August, when first contacted by The Watch, going on to explain that the quid pro quo, for customers losing calls, was a faster network.

A faster network to nowhere, I'd like to point out.

In this week's conversation, Carey observed that “compared to a few weeks ago,” the number of voice users, in the Telluride region, was up “two times to three times,” and the number of data users up by “six times to ten times.”

“Yes, but do they get through?” I wish I'd asked him.

In Wednesday's conversation, Carey voiced concern that AT&T's appeasement policy had not been mentioned in an earlier online Watch editorial about the dropped calls.

“No, we’re not paying people back what they’ve spent,” he said, but pointed the company was offering the possibility of a penalty-free transfer, on a “case-by-case” basis last summer; on Friday, he called to say that,too, was now off the table.

It would be problematic for AT&T, he observed, if a groundswell of customers succeeded in breaking their contracts.

We agreed to talk in the new year, about this and other traffic jams in cyberspace.

At this point, I'll probably be calling on my Google phone, that comes free with my $50-a-year email account.