Blue Stream Cable in Coral Springs. Photo courtesy Scott Gutman.
By: Carly Levy
Residents in Coral Springs have been facing a multitude of problems with one local cable provider ranging from poor customer service to unreliable internet connections.
Vice Mayor Dan Daley raised the issue of Blue Stream cable at the August 2 city commission meeting discussing the calls he was getting regarding the lack of customer service – as well as the lack of service.
“It’s massive,” he said. “Considering there are home-based businesses and families that rely on it [internet].”
But Commissioner Vignola was puzzled as to where Daley was hearing about the issues with Blue Stream. “I live in Cypress Run and installed Blue Stream two months ago, and I am thrilled. I know you are saying people are giving you complaints…but I haven’t had any issues. So I’m a little nervous when I see someone saying something like that.”
But just four days prior, a resident from the Eagle Lakes community sent Vignola an email asking for his help with his ongoing problem with Blue Stream. The resident even received a reply back from Vignola’s administrative assistant.
Previously named Coral Springs Cablevision, the Coral Springs portion of the company was purchased by Schurz Communications in 1978 who changed the name to Advanced Cable Communications. Last year, Schurz sold Advanced Cable Communications to Twin Point Capital and the company was renamed Blue Stream – which provides broadband and cable service to both the cities of Weston and Coral Springs.
Three months ago, Coral Springs resident Jodi Miranda started using Blue Stream after she saw an offer that promised a fast internet speed of one gigabyte. One week after receiving Blue Stream, her cable box stopped working. When Miranda called Blue Stream’s customer service number, she was kept on hold for three hours. She then decided to stop into Blue Stream’s office.
“Within my fifteen minutes of me arriving there, the lobby was packed with screaming people,” exclaimed Miranda. “People were coming into the office and they were throwing their equipment back to the people…It was really horrible.”
A Blue Stream employee gave her a new cable box, however, it still didn’t work, so Miranda to called Blue Stream again.
“I was on hold for at least an hour to an hour and a half for tech support,” explained Miranda. “I spoke to several people from all over. Finally they told me they would give me an appointment for July 28th. That was two weeks later.”
She was promised a phone call and a visit to her house to fix her internet service, yet neither one occurred. The next morning she got on the phone with Blue Stream and they told her to check the box they had given her. It was then they realized the box didn’t have any serial numbers on it.
“I realized that it was not even a box that was in inventory yet….They gave me a box that was not working, registered, or even uploaded for me to use.”
After talking to others on social media, Miranda realized that she was not alone, and there were many more Coral Springs residents complaining about the service. One neighbor suggested that she use AT&T U-verse as backup in case Blue Stream went down. Now, Miranda is paying for two internet services: AT&T U-verse and Blue Stream.
Brian Wright, a resident in the Royal Gardens community said that his service went out for three days last week and started working again last Tuesday afternoon with intermittent outrages. A technician came out Friday morning and told him his signal was weak and installed an amplifier, telling him that would fix his problems.
“Needless to say, my internet went out again last night at 9:30 and is still not working,” he said.
Before the August commission meeting, Daley reached out to Blue Stream to get answers.
“One of the regional managers said the cause of the outages is actually massive infrastructure improvements that Blue Stream is making,” explained Daley. “The gentleman I spoke with said Blue Stream’s board of directors had approved all of the funding for additional customer service representatives and for infrastructure upgrades.”
Because of the frustration with Blue Stream, Miranda wanted to switch to Comcast but was told by Comcast that they did not service her area.
Daley said that there is some confusion about Comcast’s whereabouts in Coral Springs.
“Twenty or thirty years ago, there was an exclusive deal [between Coral Springs and Advanced Cable],” said Daley. “The problem is, that exclusive deal has expired…It hasn’t existed since 2007. Comcast, up until about six months ago, has blamed the city and said the city won’t let us come into the city. It’s not true. There has not been an exclusive deal since 2007.”
Two years ago, Comcast decided to provide service to Coral Springs. Comcast claims that they have expanded in the entire city, but Daley says otherwise.
“They didn’t want to provide for the city of Coral Springs because they didn’t put their money where their mouth was. It was easier to blame us,” said Daley.
He said that Comcast is already in the city and they already offer commercial and some residential service, but it’s going to take time and investment and it’s got to be installed and programmed. “But it’s their schedule and not mine. You don’t need the city’s approval to do it.”
Despite Daley’s attempts to raise the issue at the city commission meeting, there isn’t a lot that can be done on their end. However, last week he did ask staff to find out AT&T and Comcast’s timelines for expansion.
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22 comments
The problem with advance and yes I’ll refer to them as their former name, was that exclusive agreement regardless if it expired.
Comcast had no incentive to lay their own pipe because they have no ROI, and now they have to lease the pipe from advanced to provide service which in turn adds more cost, for Comcast it’s more profitable to abandon a city like Coral Springs then it is to actually service them.
Ultimately the City must use it’s power whether legal or not and seize control of the finances and the assets of Advance/Blue Stream and liquidate them before the company has a chance to fight in court.
Use the sudo military might of the the police department to accomplish this.
It’s better as a city to be locked in court for decades with Advance then to continue to allow them to exist and continue to operate.
Really? “Sudo Military might” ? They are a business, not a public entity, the city has no stake in the business. The real question is is Blue Stream (advanced, declined whatever you want to call them) considered to be a utility, if they are (and I believe they are) then the public utilities commission could get involved.
I’m sorry but the free market /capitalism has failed in this example, it’s time for a more drastic approach and the City has the capability of doing it.
There are are precedents mind it in more liberal courts but still precedents for government operations to seize control of private corporations.
I fully believe the city would not only have the support of it’s resident’s if it did this, hell it could lead and old fashion tar and feather party to blue streams front door without much resistance.
Will the city employees seizing the corporation be wearing brown uniforms.
I hope you are not taking these two buffoons seriously.
We have been in Coral Springs for 4 years after moving from Massachusetts. We were told that
only Advanced Cable serviced Briarwood, OK we went with Advanced Cable, for the whole package phone, Internet, and cable. Well not to go on, but I had made several calls to the company, thanks to my cell phone, because of no service for any of their products. Yes, the wait time to get customer service is extremely long, I get very upset when waiting 1 to 3 hours for some one to tell you that their working on it and cannot give you and estimate of when the will have the problem resolved. That they will call you back and never do. I have even asked to speak to a supervisor and was told to call back in the morning. What no one runs this office on off hours.
Well my rant is done, I’m extremely disappointed with Advanced Cable or whatever they call themselves, now. All I want to say is that if I pay for a service, I demand that service
“He said that Comcast is already in the city and they already offer commercial and some residential service”
What they mean by this is 1000000% wrong.
Comcast DOES offer commercial services in the city of coral springs, but ONLY in the aspect of Networking and Management services.
I’ve personally haven’t seen a Comcast modem inside the city thats not on the edge of another city.
I work for Contingent(Owned by Comcast ) and we do all the networking management stuff.
I for one will NEVER move to coral springs. AT&T Uverse is just as much trash as Blue stream is. Trying to fit 50 Megs of bandwith over a single twister pair…. how long do you think thats going to last HAHAHAHAHA
50 mb stream is actually done by BONDING two lines . Uverse has given me 30mb on a single pair with no problems for years.
Don’t mind him. He’s Comcast. They’re always wrong and definitely the first company that comes to mind when you say “bad customer service”. Their TV service sucked and it was always a rip off.
Cut the cord. Install an over-the-air antenna for local channels, sign up for an Internet service independent of the cable company, and watch live stream TV (e.g. Sling TV, DirecTV Now, Hulu, etc.) and on-demand (Netflix, Amazon Prime, et al). You’ll save hundreds of dollars each year.
This is definitely a failure by coral springs Goverment. Other cities don’t have these issues. Coral Springs should have been on top of watching Blue Stream as usually acquisitions go poorly, and Coral Springs should have been courting Comcast. To say “my internet is working fine” is like someone in downtown New Orleans after Katrina saying “hey my part of NOLA didn’t flood I don’t know what your talking about”. Very arrogant.
I just switched from Uverse to Bluestream after being with Uverse Internet for 5 years without even as much as 10 minutes being down. Within 3 days of signing up with Bluestream the internet service suddenly went down. After holding for close to 30 minutes the tech support, which said they were based in Georgia, told me they cannot send anyone till 5 days after.
I asked if they sure it wasn’t an outage in the area & they assured me it was not. They told me to call the local office in Coral Springs in the morning, seeing it was a Sunday, and try to see if I could get an earlier appointment. The local office told me in the morning, after holding for an hour, that they would put me on standby for a tech the next day but I would have to wait at home all day for the tech.
Eventually, the service was back that Monday afternoon and I got a call from a rep confirming if it came back. After inquiring from the rep if it was an outage in the general area, she said yes. Smh.
It now works most of the time but everyday are issues of dropped signals & DNS errors. For a company that has been around this long & has been trying to rebrand themselves, they are doing a horrible job. They are definitely a cheaper option than Uverse but now I see you pay for what you get.
I’m so disappointed. Bluestream, please try to get your Internet act together.
Blue Stream is horrible!! The average hold time is at least an hour ! Why ???? Everything about this company is bad! Coral Springs residents we should all boycott this company and switch to anything but this mess! I will be switching back to AT&T as soon as they can get me hooked up and I have time to stay on hold for an hour and a half to cancel my account with Blue Stream! As a 30 year resident of Coral Springs I cannot believe that the residents of this city are going to tolerate these idiots!
I have been mostly happy with Advanced Cable Communications and their customer service for decades, but the things turned for the worse after they changed their name to Blue Stream. 90-180+ minute wait times for tech support and customer service, not to mention 7-14 days for service calls are completely inexcusable. Advanced Cable used to offer the awesome customer callback feature, so you would not have waste your nights and weekends waiting on the line listening annoying garbled hold music. For some reason Blue Stream took that off-line.
The new Tivo box was very unreliable for months when I first got it, but lately it has been working fine (knock on wood). The 1Gb internet service is about 650 Mbps at its best, as opposed to 900+ what it really should be, but the price (currently $70) is awesome and 650 mbps is still plenty compared to 6Mbps ADSL from AT&T and much more than I actually need and use, so no big deal.
The good news is that with Netflix, Amazon, DirecTV now and other streaming services the cable company monopolies are coming to an end.
After moving to CS 5 years ago I too was disappointed that I could only get advanced cable by knowing people who had it before and was not happy with it. I started having reliability issues almost immediately. To rule out equipment I went through a series of advanced aka blue stream equipment as well as our own purchased modem and router. Even went as far as removing the router and just using a modem straight to pc. I would always lose my 40+ meg service at the time and would only get 1-2 megs download.then get it back after I talked to them or reset equip. Funny enough 3 years ago I got told the same thing that they were doing upgrades. PLEASE STOP upgrading ur service or at least telling people that is the reason for the outages and throttling. I’m a 20+ yr CE and this is the worse network I’ve been on. Now I will say and give them credit (blue stream) is I have a biz that the office is the next building adjecent to blue stream office and it had solid network connection….so I guess if ur less then 500 feet away you can expect good biz service.
I have lived in the Springs for a little over four years. I can’t remember ever in four years paying a cable bill and feeling that I got my monies worth. I have had multiple conversations with Joe Canavan (He is the highest level in the building, was brought in after the buyout to straighten things up). Seems like a nice guy who got in over his head. The network infrastructure is ancient, he is aware. The service offering is horrible, the customer service given by most you speak to there is equally as poor. When they have large outages, they don’t answer their phones. There is no contract between the city and the cable company, Comcast is welcome to lay in their own infrastructure, they have to pull permits and do the work. Its a long term ROI. AT&T just laid fiber in my neighborhood and we go on it this Wednesday. While I know the ratings for AT&T aren’t the greatest, after four years I was about ready to get a dish so I can watch TV when its sunny out. (Subtle hint that I don’t care for satellite based providers). With a brand new fiber infrastructure in place, the service should be good. I am sure a few hiccups, but its all new fiber, instead of what we all deal with 24/7. Feel free to contact me for any questions on my conversations with Mr. Canavan.
I’m surprised these little internet providers still exists in this era of mega corporations like Comcast and AT&T. That being said, while a little pricey, Comcast in Royal Palm Beach (30 miles N of Coral Springs where I work), despite being a huge insanely big nationwide provider, is super responsive on the phone, easy to setup people to come out and when they do they spend time with your stuff until it works right. Getting approximately 40megabits to 50megabits per second (or about 4.5 megabytes download per second) on the home wifi and it it goes down maybe once a year. Uploads speed is about 12 to 15 megabits or like 1 megabytes (estimating here). Only thing I don’t like is that if you mistakenly unplug the router or otherwise have to reset something, can take like 10 minutes to come back online and re-connect.
In my area, there is also AT&T but it’s DSL only and basically pretty crappy. We tried for about 1 month (knowing residential DSL is basically a joke in most places). It came in like 0.75 megabits down and 0.25 megabits up… I felt like I was back in the AOL era.
We had directTV for many years and that’s partly what prompted us to first try the AT&T DSL. Then DirectTV kept increasing their montly bills to the point where just the TV service was more expensive than moving over 100% to comcast TV and internet. Have never looked back.
I’d be happy with DSL as it’s just for email anyway, but ATT says it discontinued this product years ago in CS.
Commissioner Vignola was puzzled? Really? BlueStream now Coral Springs Cable, Advanced Cable Communications before. What ever the name, they have always been horribly unreliable.
Puzzled or maybe to much paint fumes inhaled nothing here new same old odd thinking sad day when he was elected.
Moving to coral springs was your first mistake you already know your second. Coconut creek Or Boca Raton are by far a better choice for an IT company. Well good luck anyway.
I became a Blue Stream customer in May 2019. Every single month, I contact them, 2-3 times a month, complaining about services. The internet continuously goes down and is very slow. They have sent out technicians to my home, who clearly don’t know what they’re doing. I’ve been waiting on a call back for weeks and have yet to receive one. Why am I paying for a service that works 50% of the time?? The internet service and customer service absolutely sucks. I will be cancelling my account.