Monthly Fiber Update: August 2018

Speed up your Internet connection with Rock Island’s LTE Fixed Wireless service.

 

We’re waiving our $50 activation fee for the month of August – you just pay your monthly rate plan and that’s it. Take advantage of this special offer while it lasts!

  • Seasonal rates starting at $43/mo
  • 30-day money-back guarantee
  • No contracts
  • Setup takes 5 minutes or less!

 

With no activation fee and a 30-day money-back guarantee, you have nothing to lose by giving it a try. Setup is easy and takes 5 minutes or less.

Check to see if you or someone you love is eligible now with our eligibility search tool:

Rock Island’s LTE Fixed Wireless is powered by the mighty T-Mobile cellular network. We’ve installed 36 sites for T-Mobile over the past few years to bring this product, as well as amazing T-Mobile phone coverage to our county. Not only do we have global-leading network technology at our disposal, we have a great partner who is committed to providing amazing coverage and customer care.

Give us a call or visit us at one of our offices to give LTE Fixed Wireless a try today.


New Sites – New Service

 

Orcas West LTE

 

If you live near Deer Harbor on Orcas Island, or San Juan Drive on San Juan Island, we’re happy to let you know that we now have you covered! Yesterday we released a brand new LTE site on Orcas Island that will serve a few spots that have been pretty difficult to reach.

If you live in the one of the green areas on the above map, you should now see great LTE Fixed Wireless coverage and get fantastic T-Mobile cell service.

Side Note: Take a look at the outer islands in the channel above. Believe it or not, most of the dozens of outer islands in our county are being served beautifully by our LTE Fixed Wireless. As part of our ongoing mission, we have kept these incredibly remote places high on our list for improved connectivity. It’s true, you can get up to 25 Mbps download speeds on Jones, Charles, Yellow, Trump, Frost, Brown, Center, Rim, Dinner, etc.

The Oaks on San Juan Island

 

We are proud to announce new coverage options for the good people at The Oaks on San Juan Island. All 79 homes in that community can now connect to Rock Island Fixed Wireless. If you or one of your loved ones lives in The Oaks, give us a call to learn more about connectivity options.


We Listen and Learn

 

Recently we had an email outage that took half of our our email customers offline for over a day. It then took several days to fully repopulate email boxes with historic emails. It was a serious outage, and was hard on our customers and staff as we had recently gone through the pain of moving our email hosting off-island earlier in the year.

Our email host had a power outage which was their first major service interruption in over 15 years. They worked day and night alongside our staff to get things up and running. Since the outage, we have been working with them on an analysis of the event, including a visit to their facility to inspect their hardware.

They have been pro-active with the output of our meetings since then and have taken several measures to safeguard your data from service interruptions like this in the future. We made it very clear to them how serious this outage was for our email customers, and they have given us a firm commitment to do whatever it takes to make sure we don’t see anything like this again.

What We Learned:

We learned some important things during this outage period, and there are two that we want to highlight here:

1) Communication is key. We spoke to many affected customers by phone and email throughout our outage period, but we realized that many weren’t aware of the updates we did provide as a matter of course. Here is the official customer communication protocol we use during an outage:

  1. We post in the Updates section of our website at. Be sure to bookmark this page and visit it as stop #1 when there is an outage of any kind if you have connectivity
  2. We post our updates to our Facebook page if you are a Facebook user: https://www.facebook.com/RockIslandComm
  3. When we have a widespread outage we add messages on our main phone line and update it every 30 minutes

Be sure to check one of the above the next time we have an event.

2) Another product of our email outage was a bit of a surprise. When we spoke to customers about their email, there was an undercurrent of frustration about the way we’ve reported on our national phone company over the past year. As a result, we are going to focus on our business in the future and leave competitors out of the discussion.

We have always been clear that while it’s important to celebrate the successes and have pride in our mission, it’s also important to stop and share when we’ve made mistakes, acknowledge them, fix them and move on.

Thank you for the feedback and the opportunity for growth. We want apologize to all who were affected by our email outage, and those who have been offended by our communications about CenturyLink. We will strive to do better in the future and thank you for trusting us to do so.


Thanks all, and that’ll wrap up another edition of our Monthly Fiber Update. Thank you for your continued support; we couldn’t do this without you!

All our best,

The Rock Island Team