Adelphia to end telephone-based Internet service

BANGOR – More than 5,000 Maine customers will be affected when Adelphia Communications discontinues its dial-up, or telephone-based, Internet service on April 30, company officials said.

“We’ve always been a broadband company, and when we purchased MINT [Maine InternetWorks Inc. in 2000], they had dial-up and we continued that service,” Bill Pekarski, communications assistant at Adelphia’s corporate headquarters in Coudersport, Pa., said. “Now, we’ve built up our network in Maine to support Powerlink. Our goal when we started was to bring broadband to Maine.”

Customers who will be affected by the change reside primarily in Maine, with several thousand other customers also affected in other New England states, Pekarski said. Customers will be given the option of switching service from dial-up to the cable-based Powerlink.

In hopes of giving customers at least 30 days’ notice, the company will send out letters explaining the change in detail within the next few weeks, Pekarski said.

Powerlink allows customers to transfer information at about 500 kilobytes per second, while the dial-up allowed for about 56 KPS. The difference for the customers will go beyond the speed of their connections, however, as Powerlink costs around $43 per month and dial-up costs around $22 per month.

Customers switching to the cable service from dial-up also will have to purchase a network interface or an Ethernet card that ranges in price from $10 to $20.

Adelphia is working on a new service that may be available in the next couple of weeks, according to Mike Edgecomb, spokesman for Adelphia’s Augusta office. The new system would be cable-based, but the modem would allow for a maximum 56 KPS and would be offered at about the same price as the dial-up service, he said.

“That’s not a done deal,” Edgecomb said. “We’re looking to offer that for the more casual users.”

An unknown number of customers, however, will not be able to switch to any cable service provided by Adelphia because of a lack of cable lines in their towns.

Edgecomb, who is one of those dial-up customers without cable access, will be unable to use Adelphia’s services from his Spruce Head home after April 30.

“If I switched today, I would have to find another service,” Edgecomb said. “Right now we’re trying to find another option for those customers so we don’t just tell people they’re on their own.”

Adelphia is attempting to make arrangements with several Internet service providers throughout New England to supply customers with service after the dial-up access is terminated, Pekarski said.

Gary Crosby, manager of Adelphia’s Bangor office, said 25 percent of his division’s customers, in an area from Rockland to north of Bangor to Ellsworth, recently switched to cable service without notification. Over 2,000 dial-up customers remain in the Bangor division.

Meanwhile, a service outage for Adelphia dial-up customers throughout the state from Sunday night to Tuesday evening had nothing to do with any future termination of the service, Crosby said.

“A piece of equipment that controls the authentication process for dial-up customers failed,” Crosby said. “We really regret that this piece of equipment crashed.”

Adelphia had personnel working around the clock to repair the problem, Crosby said.