OPINION: Fiber optic installation can be a frustration

Last week, my family and I were excited to get our new fiber optic line installed by Ezee Fiber. We’d watched for weeks as crews had come up and down our street digging and tunneling the cables through, and the service represented real savings over our old Xfinity plan.

The city of Albuquerque announced four years ago an investment in fiber optic connectivity across the city to help bridge the digital divide. The project has cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and drawn thousands of complaints from residents angry over their yards being torn up and utility lines sometimes severed. Indeed, work was briefly paused last year over the outcry and, it seems, consumers may be in for more outrage. 

Despite our initial excitement, we were disappointed when the installer arrived, surveyed our house, and announced that the job would be too much work for him to do. “I only have two to three hours and this is above my pay grade,” he professed repeatedly. 

So he burrowed through our stucco and put a line into our daughter’s room and left a box of equipment at our place, telling us to hire an electrician, and it would only cost $50 to finish the job.

Needless to say, we were taken aback. We hadn’t planned or budgeted for any additional work around this. The electrician cost more like $150 than $50, though he did install the Eero system the technician had left behind, which acts as a router for the network. 

Cody Mock, of Mock ‘n Son, shook his head when he saw the job. “They’re lazy — they take the easiest possible route to just install and leave,” he said, noting the placement of the Ezee Fiber box, awkwardly in our 16-year-old daughter’s room, instead of in the closet where we have all our networking equipment. 

Wondering if many other Albuquerqueans had had a similar experience, I reached out to Ezee Fiber and asked: How many people have to hire their own electrician to install the network? 

“The vast majority of the time, our Ezee Fiber technicians can professionally complete installations in the exact location inside the customer’s home with no complications. However, due to (the) fact (that) some homes have no attic or a flat roof, minor accommodation may be needed sometimes for installation,” Jim Schwartz, an Ezee Fiber spokesman, wrote me in an email. 

Indeed, the dispatcher we called to ask what we do with the box they left said something similar: that this happens a lot in New Mexico because the adobe-style homes have flat roofs and no attics, making installing the cable in the right, or preferred place, sometimes challenging. By right, I mean next to a dataport outlet, which is where the fiber optic cable needs to be plugged in. For us, we had such outlets in our bedrooms and the study. The study would’ve required trenching around half the house, under two exterior walls and then a run across the room to the outlet. So, the technician recommended our daughter’s room as it was much closer to the street and we agreed that we didn’t want a giant box in the front of the house. 

“In very rare instances, we recommend the resident hire an electrician to install a power outlet to complete the installation if the resident has a specific location where they want the Ezee Fiber high-speed fiber internet connection placed and there is no power outlet nearby,” Schwartz continued. 

Now this wasn’t at all our case. While we would’ve preferred it to be near all our other equipment, we would’ve settled for simply working. But that would’ve put the install technician over his allotted two hours. The Ezee dispatcher said that the installers are subcontracted and are paid per installation and thus are motivated not to linger at any one location. Which is why ours simply left the equipment in a box and told us to hire an electrician. 

I have no idea how many New Mexicans have hired, or will have to hire, an electrician should they want working fiber optic service from Ezee Fiber, but I decided to write this column as a warning to those considering the switch that they may encounter an unanticipated surcharge. After I told Ezee that I planned to write a column about my experience, Schwartz wrote back to me. 

“If you are agreeable to not writing about this in a column, we can likely have the right techs involved to have your whole house network set up at our expense. We cannot offer this to everyone as it exceeds what we normally do,” Schwartz wrote. “We are in the business of making friends. If you are open to this, our General Manager and SVP, who lives nearby, will personally make sure the whole house set-up is done to your liking.”

Now, I’m a journalist and it’s against my code to personally profit from any story I write. So, I politely turned Schwartz down on his offer. I briefly entertained the idea: maybe we could convince Ezee to sponsor our daily news podcast, The Leading News, as it’s hugely popular and would be a great way for them to show they care about the community. But that email felt icky and I didn’t want to barter with the integrity of the paper. 

Besides, I wasn’t convinced that Ezee Fiber understands what good business practices are.

Jay Newton-Small is the editor-in-chief and executive vice president of the Albuquerque Journal.