Letter to the Editor: Rural challenges

To the Editor:

Allamakee and Winneshiek counties share similar topography and rural challenges. I believe the issues that I’m experiencing in my neighborhood may be shared with those in yours.

I can only report what my own and some of my neighbors’ experiences have been, but I suspect the problem goes beyond my part of Winneshiek County. I live about ten miles from Decorah along the Upper Iowa River, where the terrain is pretty rough. Cell reception is spotty at best.

During the summer, I had experienced two landline telephone outages that lasted one week each from cable breaks. What used to take two days to fix now takes seven. In early September, a widespread outage occurred that affected up to ten homes near mine. The telephone cables under the Upper Iowa River had been swept away after recent flooding.

It was in the same place where the new bridge is under construction. Centurylink had moved the cables, but not very well. This outage lasted three weeks. Centurylink had been notified last year to move the cables for the bridge construction.

I have two filed complaints with the Iowa Utility Board. The first for the outage due to the flood. The second complaint is to request that Centurylink bury the cables. There are at least two places where the cables are exposed either to traffic over a driveway, or strung across a creek, where they are exposed to weather and cattle. They have been that way for years.

This tells me that Centurylink has abandoned my rural Iowa. They are not interested in investing in my community. The infrastructure is decades old. They have no intention of investing in new technology, such as DSL for broadband. They are waging a war of attrition, waiting for people to disconnect their phones and tolerate what spotty cell coverage is available.

If anyone else has similar stories to share, I would be interested in hearing.

Tim Lecander
Decorah