Fayette

County has notified MediaOne that the cable

company "is not in compliance with the terms

and conditions of the current franchise

agreement."

Approval

of the pending transfer of that agreement to

communications giant AT&T, which is in the

process of acquiring MediaOne, is in jeopardy,

said assistant county manager Chris Cofty in a

July 30 letter to the company.

MediaOne

is not maintaining its current equipment, is not

moving quickly to upgrade that equipment, and

"is in violation of both article 12.2 of the

franchise and standards set by the Federal

Communications Commission regarding customer

service standards," said Cofty's letter.

Copies

of the letter were sent to AT&T, Cofty told

The Citizen this week.

MediaOne

representatives have until Sept. 3 to respond to

the concerns raised in the letter, said Cofty,

adding that the firm has promised to begin its

answer by mail this week.

Customer

service is the biggest problem, said Cofty, who

worked for MediaOne before joining Fayette

County. He held up a file folder filled with

complaint letters an inch thick. By contrast, he

opened a similar folder with complaint letters

concerning Intermedia Cable, which serves some

parts of Fayette. The Intermedia folder for the

same time period held only two complaints.

"We

get eight to ten calls a day pertaining to

MediaOne," he said. "I talk to more

MediaOne customers now than I did when I worked

there."

Most

of the residents who phone his office to complain

about cable service say virtually the same thing,

said Cofty. They lose service often and for long

periods of time, and when they phone MediaOne's

customer service phone number, they are put on

hold for a half hour or longer, and when they

finally reach a representative, they are dealt

with rudely.

"I

had one guy come in here," said Cofty,

"and sit down and tell me that he was on

hold for 16 minutes the first time he called and

then disconnected. He called again and was on

hold 27 minutes and was disconnected. On the

third attempt he got through in just eight

minutes, but the person he spoke with told him

with a very condescending attitude that he

couldn't get credit for the outage because he

didn't report it when it happened.

"How

could he report it when he couldn't get

through?" Cofty wanted to know.

But

the root of the problem is in maintenance of the

system, Cofty said. "If they had a more

reliable system, our customers wouldn't have to

get through to customer service," he said.

In

his letter to MediaOne, Cofty demanded that the

company prove that it is maintaining Fayette's

system. "Fayette County would like to send a

representative with MediaOne personnel out to

verify functionality of all stand by power

supplies in Fayette County and request a copy of

a map indicating placement of these stand by

power supplies," he wrote.

He

also asked for a copy of the company's

maintenance log pertaining to stand by power

supples from June 1, 1998 to July 28, 1999, along

with other maintenance records. The county's

franchise agreement with MediaOne requires that

those records be produced.

Stand

complaints, Cofty said. Many customers say that

they have electrical power but no cable service.

But if stand by power supplies aren't working

properly, he said, a customer in one part of the

county can lose cable service because of a power

outage in another area.

"They're

in a reactive mode more than a preventive

mode," Cofty said. "You don't get the

kind of complaints we get when there's not a

problem."

In

recent interviews, company officials have told

The Citizen that they are working to solve both

the maintenance and customer service problems in

Fayette. The final solution to the maintenance

problem is to replace Fayette's antiquated

coaxial cable lines and supporting equipment with

a state-of-the-art fiber optic system, said

public information officer Reg Griffin.

That's

supposed to happen over the next year. The

county's franchise agreement requires the firm to

replace the system by Dec. 31, 2000, and Griffin

said the company will do better than that,

finishing by around September 2000.

The

Citizen offered MediaOne officials an opportunity

to respond to this story, but as of deadline

spokesmen had not done so.

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