Over a month after local Internet service provider Hollinet
filed for bankruptcy, customers are upset about a lack of technical
support and are anxious to know when full service will be
returned.
Over a month after local Internet service provider Hollinet filed for bankruptcy, customers are upset about a lack of technical support and are anxious to know when full service will be returned.
Hollister resident Max Sweet, who has been a faithful Hollinet customer since 1998, temporarily lost his Internet connection over the weekend and has had e-mail problems for several
weeks.
He hasn’t been able to send e-mails for a week and has been receiving copious amounts of
spam e-mails in his inbox since about the time Hollinet filed for Chapter 7 on May 5, he said.
“Their service has been real good up until now,” Sweet said. “If they don’t come around within a week or so, I’m going to get some other sort of service … and my close friends I’ve talked to are too.”
Sweet said he knows of several people who already switched from Hollinet to Charter Communications because they were so frustrated with Hollinet’s service.
The fact that they don’t know what’s going on with the new company adds to their frustration, he said.
“We’re getting no technical support,” Sweet said. “I call the phone number and all I get is a message, but I can’t leave a message because the message box is full. Communicate with us – just tell us something. Just tell us you’re working on it.”
Since Hollinet’s assets were bought at a bankruptcy auction on May 27, the new owner, James McDonald, said he has been working through the necessary paperwork and attempting to compile a new support staff to get the company back in full swing.
Full service should be back next week, he said.
McDonald and his new staff moved into Hollinet’s office on San Felipe Road late Friday and spent the weekend catching up on billing, calling customers with critical service problems and responding to some e-mails from apprehensive customers about their faltering service, he said.
“There’s just so much to do,” he said. “This place has been a ghost ship for over a month.”
Hollinet has six dial-up servers, and one of the servers didn’t have enough memory to access the user names, which was why some people couldn’t log onto the Internet over the weekend, he said.
The server affected anyone with a dial-up modem, and if their telephone line happened to land on that server they wouldn’t have been able to connect, he said.
“Ordinarily it is basic maintenance that’s done, but because we were just able to get in here that’s why it took awhile,” he said.
Local businesses and city and county governments that use Hollinet’s T1 service would not have been affected because it is an unrelated server to the one that ran out of memory, McDonald said.
Hollinet customer Robert Hoefler, who has been satisfied with his service for the past five years, also lost service over the weekend and has tried in vain to contact someone at Hollinet to help him, he said.
“I’ve called about three times a day for the past four days and there’s nobody there,” Hoefler said. “All my neighbors are frustrated with it. They say they want to switch and I tell them to just give it time and they’ll get it all straightened out.”
Hoefler is willing to wait another week for McDonald to get everything back online, but also would like better communication in the meantime.
“If everyone will just bear with us for a little bit we’ll have a lot of new features coming online,” McDonald said. “We’re trying to catch up on everything we need to do – it is not a small task.”
