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Innovative Plans Improvements to St. John's Phone and Internet Service

Sept. 12, 2008 — Planned improvements to Innovative Telephone's Internet and phone service on St. John involve major equipment, according to a company representative, and may not help with ongoing complaints from residents.
The improvements will provide insurance should problems occur with the phone company's microwave dish at Pastory, St. John, said Innovative spokeswoman Janette Millin Young.
Innovative leases space on the V.I. Water and Power Authority's fiber-optic cable that runs between St. Thomas and St. John to provide redundancy for St. John.
"The fiber will be a backup system for St. John with additional bandwidth capabilities," said Dennis Chance, Innovative's engineering vice president, according to a news release. "Customers are currently fed by a single microwave connection back to St. Thomas."
Work is already underway and is expected to take a couple of weeks, Young said.
Several residents said they still hope for telephone-company improvements that will actually fix their ailing telephone service.
"Of course, my phone service hasn't gotten better," said Coral Bay resident Pam Gaffin.
Gaffin was one of several people who complained about the island's phone service at a Coral Bay Community Council meeting held June 13, 2005.
When it rains a lot, Gaffin said, she has no dial tone. When it rains a little, the phone crackles. Gaffin said she has replaced her home's interior phone lines three times. Additionally, Innovative sent repair crews many times, but they can't seem to solve the problem.
Rafe Boulon, the V.I. National Park's chief of resource management and a St. John resident, laughed out loud when asked whether there have been any improvements with the phone service at his office at the Biosphere Reserve.
The Biosphere Reserve, located at Lind Point outside Cruz Bay, has one intermittently functioning telephone line that frustrates callers who must make repeated attempts to get through to park and U.S. Geological Survey staff based at the reserve.
"I thought last week it was fixed," Boulon said.
Alas, the phone line died again, he said.
At home on the North Shore, Boulon has a phone line that rings once and then quits.
"It usually happens when it's raining," he said. "I think it's a short."
Boulon has also made repairs to his interior phone lines, and said he's convinced the problem belongs to Innovative.
Stephen Hull, who lives at Ajax Peak, also laughed out loud when asked how his phone service is doing. However, he said the phone company is at fault only about one out of seven times he has problems.
It took Innovative about two weeks and a couple to trips to fix the most recent problem, but after the phone company made repairs he still had dead phone lines, Hull said. He found ants in two of his telephones.
"I took the phones apart and washed them with a toothbrush," he said.
Bordeaux resident Chris Clark was philosophical about phone problems.
"There's some crackling, but that's life," he said.
In response to a question about what Innovative planned to do about the complaints from Gaffin, Boulon and Hull, Young said only that "we address all of our customers' concerns."
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