Blue Stream in Coral Springs
By: Carly Levy
Amid customer complaints about poor internet connections as well as slow customer service from local cable provider Blue Stream, CEO Joe Canavan addresses the challenges the company has been facing.
Customers of Blue Stream have taken to social media complaining about their inconsistent internet service as well as long hold times to customer service. There were also complaints that technicians were not arriving to service their homes as promised. Canavan addressed the two reasons why Blue Stream customers were having issues: a flood in June and a network upgrade in July.
“The flood tripled the wait time. What happened was the network itself got submerged into water – and about 25 percent of the network,” said Canavan. “Customers go offline so you get a bunch of people calling ahead saying ‘why is my network out?’ Then what would happen is it takes a little while for the network to dry out and identify problems, and once we identify those problems, we would go fix them.”
He added that in July, upgrades needed to be made to the lasers that were not touched for over ten years by Advanced Cable because of budget cuts and network maintenance. When Blue Stream tried to upgrade the new lasers to increase network reliability and customer satisfaction, some areas of Coral Springs were experiencing unexpected disruptions in their internet connection. The average hold times would last from four to 36 minutes.
Canavan said that corrective measures were taking place to ensure these problems would be fixed, such as temporarily using a call center in Georgia, fixing the places that were having the worst problems and increasing their staff by 20 percent.
“We’re going to go back and fix the entirety of the network so it goes back and gets every gremlin out, so that going forward this is a very robust and reliable network for everybody,” promises Canavan. “By doing the network improvements, that’s really where we’re going to get everyone back to stable.”
Canavan said that the goal of Blue Stream is to offer world class customer service and great products. The company increased their customer service and technical support staff by 30 percent prior to launching new products such as one gigabyte internet speed and TiVo. According to him, by the end of next Friday, everything with Blue Stream will go back to normal and that by the beginning of October, “This network is going to be in better shape than it has ever been before and much more reliable than it’s ever been.”
CEO Joe Canavan second from left with Warren Lyon, Manager of Technical Operations; Carleesha Porter, Vice President of Operations; and Craig Walker, Systems Engineer.
Blue Stream, formally Advanced Cable has been in Coral Springs for 37 years and was one of the early pioneers of cable itself said Canavan. The Schurz family previously owned Advanced Cable, however, after losing a bulk contract with the town of Weston and a lot of underinvesting, Advanced Cable was put on the market with network maintenance and upgrades being cut back. It was not until August of 2016 that Twin Point Capital bought the company which was rebranded last February as Blue Stream.
Canavan keeps a customer service monitoring tool that shows in real-time how many people are in queue, how many are being tended to, and how long the wait times are. He is also able to get feedback through his LinkedIn account and e-mails. Two times a day, there are meetings with staff – once in the morning and then again in the afternoon to discuss customer feedback as well as fix ongoing issues.
“We are literally running two shifts day and night to get this back to a place where they don’t have to worry about it,” said Canavan. “We look at every node down to the customer level to find out who’s having trouble and what we can do about it. It has 100 percent of our attention right now. There’s nothing else we’re paying attention to besides getting this network restored.”
Canavan wishes that Vice Mayor Dan Daley would see things from the perspective of what Blue Stream is going through.
“I just don’t think Dan had a full understanding of everything that was going on,” said Canavan. “Dan had a talk with our director of business and services off-site and I didn’t have an opportunity to talk with him and I just think that when someone is talking about a three-hour hold time, I can’t validate that, but at least this is an opportunity to come in and see these guys are actually monitoring stuff. They have a plan of record. They’re focusing. They’re moving forward. I don’t think Dan can convey that in talking to people.”
Blue Stream understands the stakes with fixing these issues as fast as possible considering they are competing against two major cable providers: AT&T and Comcast.
“We all take this personally. None of us are sleeping at night,” explains Canavan. “People are giving up vacations. They’re giving up holidays. They’re staying late and not seeing their families. This is not something that anyone has taken lightly. We want [customers] to be proud that they’re with Blue Stream but we need to go back and re-earn that.”
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12 comments
Today I turned in my equipment to Blue Stream. When the rep asked why I simply stated I’ve switched to a fiber based service for better reliability. It’s been pretty bad recently. I’ve been in contact with Joe Canavan and I feel badly for his position. The network is outdated, flooding and such.
Joe is a nice guy and I don’t believe he has any intentions of being the CEO of a company that delivers a poor customer experience.
But for me, I could no longer tolerate the level of service. Let’s hope they work it all out.
Mr. Canavan, I am a business owner in Coral Springs who has had 3 outages in the past week, both phones and internet, which shuts down my ability to conduct business. Your customer service wait times are awful, and even when I did eventually get through (one time was 78 minutes of hold time), your representative couldn’t hear me due to the phone line issues and promised to call right back on my cellphone. He never did. I have already spoken to AT&T about switching back, and I’d like to know that I could cancel my BlueStream contract without penalty if these issues continue.
This is what happens when there is little motivation … adv cable did NOTHING for years. I remember using OMGFAST back in the day – it was wireless and it was fast but it is long gone now. The city should have allowed multiple cable co’s to compete rather than issuing monopolies… thank god for directv back in the 90’s or adv cable would have stayed analog with 35 channel offerings….
Just another wise decision by politicians and Staff.
Remember, the city got a 25 cent per customer kickback from the cable co. To Guarantee a. monopoly, that fee of course was passed on to the customers of the cable co along with other taxes and fee. The city spent the money . Residents lose again.
I also used omgfast. It was great!! What happened?
We ended up turning in our blue stream equipment after multiple outages, and after the last outage we couldn’t get a service tech to come out for 2 weeks (which was the 3rd week in June). No internet during finals for college online courses was the final nail in the coffin. Customer service was the same as with advanced cable. Unable to get call backs, long wait times on hold. I can’t be with an internet provider that has connectivity issues on a daily basis. We went back to AT&T for the reliability.
Omg Joe canavan said blue stream will be better. I can’t wait to restart my blue stream services and deal with aggravation and bad customer service. He literally couldn’t have done anything less.
I’m still waiting for BS to replace the television broken by the installer on June 14. My elderly mother is in poor health and watched that television every night. Despite repeated calls, emails and texts, no one from BS has made good on the promise to replace it. Shame on them.
I’d like to post an update to my earlier comment. After posting my concerns here, I was contacted by the Business Division of Blue Stream. They came out to meet with me and discuss my service problems with both phones and internet. They explained what their current plans are for improvements to the infrastructure of the network, and said they would do what they could to help me. I was contacted nearly every day afterward with updates – the internet issues were addressed first, and the phone issues required installing upgrades to the equipment in my office building. Communication with the Blue Stream team was excellent. I now seem to have super fast internet speed with no outages and no phone issues anymore. They were very responsive, which I appreciate. I truly believe that they are trying their hardest to resolve the ongoing equipment and network issues. I’d like to publicly thank Ray Carballo, Director of Sales, for getting things moving in the right direction and realizing that businesses can’t run without working phones and internet! Thank you to Blue Stream for making this right for my company.
Harriet Docteroff
Docteroff Medical Billing, Inc.
It’s been three years now since this post was submitted. We are still at the same place no with slow internet service text line about the what the issues are and Blue streak over promising their customers on service that is not possible with their current infrastructure in Coral. All they’re doing is sending six text to your home every single month so they can keep you waiting or make it seem as if they’re really trying but it’s absolutely nothing that they can do until they update the infrastructure and split the notes and Coral Springs or upgrade all the customers to fiber optic to get the one gigabit speeds but as we are aware past 3-4 years they have not been able to do any of that other than patch everything up.
I live in Weston and had Comcast and switched to Blue Stream since I was having same problem with them. Only difference now is that I’m paying less. I think everyone is seeing same problem due to too many people at home streaming. Around the world people are turning to the internet to do their work and to connect with others as the COVID-19 outbreak forces everyone to stay away from the office and crowds. This is what I found on another site about Comcast: “We’ve been watching the network very closely,” said Joel Shadle, a spokesman for Comcast. “We’re seeing a shift in peak usage. Instead of everyone coming home and getting online, we’re seeing sustained usage and peaks during the day.” I’ve seen Blue Stream construction crews in the area for the past few weeks and now seems more stable. I guess Blue Stream is recognizing the need for additional capacity so there is going to be some unevenness in experiences until they complete upgrading their capacity. I have not seen any Comcast construction so I guess I made the right choice.