When Jackson Energy Authority severed its relationship with Click1, an Internet provider in Humboldt, it didn’t take long for the ripple effect to be felt.
“This affects people more than missing a couple of TV channels,” said Jeff Delaney, a Humboldt businessman who works for Advantage Lock. “A lot of my work is done online, and now, my Internet has been out all day and I can’t do a lot of what I need to do until it’s restored. This is ridiculous.”
According to Click1, discontinuation of two of its television channels the company offers it customers is a direct action taken by Jackson Energy Authority.
A note posted on the Click1 website stated, “Because of our response to Tuesday’s internet outage caused by Jackson Energy Authority’s lack of cooperation on the evening of July 19, JEA gave us 23 hours notice that they were maliciously disconnecting 2 of your TV channels: Channel 5 NBC Memphis and Channel 9 CBS Jackson. Their notice states that this disconnection would occur at High Noon on August 3.
We believe that you should, thus, direct your complaints to:
Mr. Ben Lovins, Senior Vice President, JEA Telecommunication Division, at 731-265-5736.
We hope to have these two channels back on. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
Click1 was responding to a letter the company received from JEA – dated August 2 – which served as notice “JEA’s intention to terminate all JEA Telecom Services effective at noon, August 3, 2017.”
Warmath said the only correspondence Click1 received was an email from Lovins stating all services would be discontinued.
Jackson Energy Authority released this statement concerning the situation.
“For many years, JEA has had a working relationship with Click1 providing fiber backhaul. Earlier
this year, Click1 notified JEA that they had decided to work with another vendor for these
services.
Three weeks ago, Click1 contacted JEA about providing redundancy for the fiber backhaul.
Despite numerous attempts to negotiate redundancy with John Warmath, he would not
commit to the specific services needed by Click1 and contract terms and conditions.
On July 25, 2017, John Warmath met face to face with Ben Lovins, Vice President of JEA
Telecommunications, regarding a commitment to redundancy and other telecom services for
Click1.
John Warmath would not commit to any services and contract terms and conditions.
When the August 1, 2017 Click1 outage occurred, Click1 blamed JEA for the lack of redundancy
even though JEA had made numerous overtures to Click1 to negotiate new terms and
conditions, including redundancy, for Click1.
At this point, contract negotiations between JEA and Click1 have reached a stalemate, and JEA
had no choice but to severe the relationship.”
Warmath said while it is true Click1 and Jackson Energy Authority have had a working relationship for several years, he said it is neither “true nor fair” to say that numerous attempts have been made negotiate redundancy.
“The truth is that we pay well-above market rate for JEA to provide us access to two different bandwidth providers,” Warmath said. “The price of bandwidth has fallen precipitously over the last decade, so, almost one year ago, we issued an RFP for bandwidth. Given every opportunity to bring their rates down, JEA still failed to do so despite the exemplary record of on-time payments and healthy relationship from Click1.”
Warmath said earlier this year, Click1 signed an agreement with a second bandwidth provider.
“In order, to ensure the connection’s consistency, we asked JEA to set up a peering session between the three of us (JEA, Click1, and Click1’s second provider) on July 19 at midnight,” Warmath said. “This would allow us to provide automatic fail-over should either link fail. After initially agreeing to do so, JEA reneged by refusing to answer the phone at the scheduled time of midnight on July 19-20.”
Wamath said Tuesday, August 1, a JEA fiber was severed near Three Way resulting in a widespread and prolonged outage.
“We were forced to manually move traffic to our second provider because of JEA’s actions on July 19,” Warmath said. “We believe that our customers deserved to know how/why this unnecessary outage occurred. JEA appears to have taken offense to our transparency and retaliated with the letter on August 2nd giving us less than 24 hours notice of termination of telecom services.”
Warmath said there have been no ongoing negotiations, and our “meeting” was a standing, five-minute chat at a cable conference in Indianapolis, and new terms were not discussed.
“We have a standing month-to-month agreement, which JEA should have honored, and, in case they missed ethics in business school – provide a minimum 30 days notice of termination in the future,” Warmath said. “This type of malicious strong-arming is indicative of the monopoly utility mindset. As of today, we have NBC and CBS back up for the weekend. However, JEA threatens to cut them off again should we not get them a signed contract committing to pay $1,500 more per month by 5 p.m., Monday.”
David Thomas, Twitter – @DavidThomasWNWS
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