Here was the proposal by BrightHouse that was approved by Council in April. In some ways, it’s not an apples to apples comparison as the city was looking to replace connections between existing facilities as well as upgrade its Internet connection. However, you can see that the cost of that service from AT&T was significantly more expensive that BrightHouse’s proposal.

Well said.

Regarding your point #1 above… it would have been funny having U-Verse video running through a BrightHouse line

Didn’t anyone know that we needed the AT&T lines back when we were negotiating the City’s ISP service?

This is the equal service these clients have payed for and this is a cost associated with having multiple cable providors. Staff has looked at T1 service from vendor A, Vendor B and AT&T. This is why staff fells AT&T is the best T1 provider.”

We had that discussion at the Council meeting. I had the same concerns about why we would want to add a new T-1 connection with AT&T when we already had an existing Internet connection with BrightHouse. In an ideal world, the city would have a single Internet provider who could provide us a connection with enough bandwidth to support both our existing Internet traffic from the city as well as the new video service. But for reasons outlined below, that wasn’t an option. Rob Petty’s answers to why he recommended AT&T were:

1) The existing BrightHouse service could not dedicate the amount of bandwidth required for the video service on the existing Internet connection. You need that dedicated bandwidth to ensure the quality of the video service.

2) Even if the existing BrightHouse connection could have been used, it’s likely that the route from BrightHouse to the AT&T U-Verse network would have introduced additional potential points of failure as compared to using AT&T’s infrastructure. A video service like this requires a stable connection and each “hop” you add to the path of traffic introduces the potential of a reduction in the quality of the video service.

3) The city just recently signed a new contract for Internet service with BrightHouse. In order to aggregate our Internet and video service with AT&T or another provider, it would have required breaking that contract.

4) AT&T’s proposal also provided a rebate that covers the costs of the equipment, setup and maintenance for the service for the first year. If the city had gone with another service provider for T-1s, we would have had to cover those costs. While I don’t think AT&T is the lowest cost provider, as Rob Petty stated during the meeting, the savings realized from this rebate more than offset what would have been saved by going with another service provider.

Again, I think the questions that have been raised are good ones. I think for both technical and financial reasons, the AT&T solution that we selected makes the most sense. As I stated at the meeting, down the roads as contracts come up for renewal, we should be looking at consolidating our Internet and video service with a single provider. But at this time, I haven’t seen any information that indicates that another provider would have given the city a better solution for both the technical needs of the system and the financial costs of the project.

ATT was selected because the Internet connection exclusively to their backbone using equipment that is for that specific purpose. There was no way to have an apples to apples comparison of service providers for T-1’s in this instance. Why anybody feels that ATT is a favored vendor in this decision is beyond my comprehension. Also, would another vendor have provided us with the nearly $10,000 in hardware that ATT provided? Taking the whole package into consideration, that City got a very competitive deal.

For the record, I believe:

• Having competition in the Novi Cable market is a good thing.
• Customers who pay for a service, should expect to receive that service.
• AT&T deserves a level playing field as do their competitors in ALL parts of their business offerings.
• One of the primary charters of the Novi City Council is to assure that the city is doing buisness with the least cost responsible bidder.

On this latter issue, one has to respect Scott Olson’s opinion. While I agree that both Brighthouse and AT&T customers deserve equal access, there is little evidence that competitive T1 bids were analyzed.

In this last piece of Council business, I find myself sitting with Kathy Crawford. During the council meeting she felt it necessary to voice that many citizens did not take advantage of the technology being discussed. Do we write off her constituents as “misinformed”. No that is not right.

This issue was simply about leasing the wire the AT&T Universe system runs on.

In my opinion this discussion should have been, -

This is the equal service these clients have payed for and this is a cost associated with having multiple cable providors. Staff has looked at T1 service from vendor A, Vendor B and AT&T. This is why staff fells AT&T is the best T1 provider.

Instead we heard how AT&T has been falsely portrayed and got an evalution of AT&T Universe.

In this Day and age a T1 connection can only be provided effectively by one vendor? Hardly. Service level agreements (SLA’s) with multiple vendors are common place in today’s networks.

Is AT&T the least cost responsible bidder? From Monday’s meeting I can’t answer that question. That’s the question I elect a Council to answer.

But who knows, maybe on the next Council agenda there will be a consumer report on Plasma TV’s.

Good start. Time to get back into blogging!!