I recently received an e-mail from the Rock Island team entitled “The continued decline and failure of CenturyLink in San Juan County” as well as an e-mail from OPALCO entitled “Time to Switch to Your Local Internet Company: Rock Island, CenturyLink merger is bad news for San Juan County.” These are just the latest in Rock Island’s continuing denigration of CenturyLink. They should stop bad-mouthing the competition and instead put effort into serving the many people in the county who are unable to get any decent internet service from Rock Island. Thanks to CenturyLink’s upgrade of their VDSL broadband I now have steady reliable download speeds of 25 Mbs. I spent several years trying to get decent broadband speeds through Rock Island. They first pushed optical fiber to the house expecting local users to pay almost all the costs of middle and last miles. I and a friend/neighbor spent time trying to drum up enthusiasm in our neighborhood for this Rock Island service but the costs in our low-density neighborhood were completely prohibitive. Then Rock Island started pushing their LTE service. I spent a huge amount of time and some expense (different antennas, different locations) trying to get an acceptable signal at my house. But reception was sporadic at best and when it occasionally worked at all it was extremely slow. But Rock Island kept stringing me along, telling me that new LTE towers would fix the problem. But they never did. Recently CenturyLink upgraded their VDSL service and I now am a very satisfied customer. I encourage everyone who cannot get decent broadband service from Rock Island to contact CenturyLink. And I wish Rock Island would stop knocking CenturyLink and put their own house in order.

Eric Adelberger

San Juan Island