Growing pains for Mediacom in Decorah as it gets ready for gigabit residential speeds

First, the good news.  Mediacom says it will be offering gigabit speeds to residential customers in Decorah starting in January.

Now, the "Rest of the Story."  Company officials admit they encountered problems in early November when they installed equipment necessary to handle the faster speeds.

Mediacom employees installed a "Cable Modem Termination System"—"CMTS" for short—in the Decorah area on November.  Such units cost between $600,000 to $700,000.

But unlike previous generations of equipment that were merely hardware, the CMTS unit was a "next generation" piece of equipment that required software tweaks in order to do the best job of distributing the load demand in the Decorah area.  It took almost two weeks to get the new equipment to work properly.

During that time, some customers who had paid for 150 MB of Internet service reported speeds as low as 3MB or even 0.9MB. 

On Thursday afternoon, City of Decorah officials and Metronet officials met with local Mediacom representatives to discuss the problem.  About 20 people attended the meeting.  Mediacom representative Lee Grassley stressed that the issue has been solved and speeds are back to normal.  But he also admitted that Mediacom received complaints from 36 Decorah customers about the speed problems.

One of the people who had complained was Decorah resident Kyle Sorenson, who said he pays for 150 MB of service, but got as low as 1MB during the problems.  He told the Mediacom representatives Thursday that when he complained, "I got jerked around."

By the end of the hour and a half meeting on Wednesday, local Mediacom representatives agreed to talk with their managers about partial rebates for some customers, as well as a public statement discussing the recent problems.