I had a conversation today with Bryon Wentzlaff of Prime Time Communications and he answered a few questions on the STB replacement in progress. By his figures, about 1800 boxes were replaced leading up to the termination of signals from Broadweave that occurred on Sunday. That was all done in the last two weeks just after Prime Time inked the final deal to purchase MSTAR.
He also said there are still around 900 boxes left to replace, most in student housing. Part of the problem is that they didn’t have enough boxes to complete all of the replacements, but those are supposed to arrive in the Wasatch Front tomorrow morning and a team of 30 installers will be replacing them as fast as they can over the next two weeks. I know that’s small consolation to those of you looking at a blank screen after months (or years) of video issues with MSTAR, but have some patience with them. Replacing 2700 boxes in a month is no small feat.
The fact of the matter is that this was not a well planned out transition. We got shafted for video services. How would you have twisted the same story had this been a provo modification. I am guessing it would have had a more negative spin.
Laying blame on Prime Time would be inappropriate since this is MSTAR’s last act of screwing up prior to being acquired. They knew from the moment iProvo and the head-end sold that they would end up in this situation sooner or later, Broadweave gave them over a month of notice as to when exactly it would happen, and they strung Prime Time along for two months worth of negotiation before the deal closed while they reportedly tried to solicit other offers. I see that Prime Time is trying to make the best of a seriously crappy situation, kind of like when Broadweave had to do an emergency port of phone numbers from MSTAR. You may recall I gave them credit for that.