Collins Meets With Windstream CEO

By MJ Kneiser, WLHR Radio, Lavonia

U.S. Congressman Doug Collins is calling a meeting Monday with Windstream officials a step in the right direction.

Recently, Collins sent another letter to Windstream CEO Tony Thomas to follow up on previous concerns and emphasize the growing number of complaints his office continues to receive from dissatisfied Windstream customers in Northeast Georgia.

Collins met Monday with Thomas and Windstream’s Georgia President of Operations to address those issues.

The congressman said several key initiatives were discussed during the meeting.

“They have said they’ve put in 40 new technicians, which should be operational by the September time frame. They’ve already got some of them on the job,” Collins explained. “They’ve also committed to working with my district director and their new operations manager who lives in the district. They’re going to be meeting every two weeks ago to go over complaints that we’re getting and to go over progress made so that we can get everybody on the same page.”

Collins said he also invited Windstream officials to hold periodic town hall meetings with customers to address their concerns, but he says they refused the offer, opting instead to focus on what they’re already doing to improve customer service.

Still, Collins said he thought the meeting was productive.

“It was a good first step. They claim their network is not over capacity and that they have upgraded to a sufficient point to where the higher speeds should be accessible to most customers,” Collins said. “I expressed that I was doubtful about those issues because of the complaints we received.”

In a four-page response letter to Collins after Monday’s meeting, Thomas says his company continues to work on customer issues.

Thomas said 97 percent of customers in the 9th Congressional District have full fiber-optic network capacity.

“We were pleased the Congressman was able to have the time to meet with us so we could share what we’re doing in terms of investing in the network and increasing our ability to provide more network speed and broadband to the 9th Congressional District,” Thomas said.

One of the biggest complaints from customers is slow Internet speeds.

Thomas said it is not the company’s broadband, it’s the size of the service the customer has.

“So when you talk about that slowing down and the congestion, what that really relates to typically is the in-home variance,” Thomas explained. “Windstream can provide 80% of the constituents in the 9th District 10mbps or higher, but 80% of the Congressman’s constiuents are actually subscribed to 3-6mbps. So what happens in the evenings is you when you get more than one user one more than one device in the home, you’re trying to put too much bandwidth through too small a pipe.”

Thomas said any customer with issues of slow Internet speeds should contact the Rapid Response Team in Cornelia or their local Windstream customer service representative.

Meanwhile, Collins said he hopes Thomas will at some point take him up on his offer to hold town hall meetings with customers to hear firsthand their frustrations with Windstream service.