Feeling Disconnected Slow, Unreliable Phone Lines Leave St. Maries Residents On Wrong Side Of Digital Divide

When it rains, phone connections often crackle or die. Internet service is nonexistent or agonizingly slow. Not all fax machines and answering machines work.

The telephone woes of customers along the lower St. Joe River Road aren’t unique. The digital divide remains a high barrier for many rural Americans with antiquated lines. Deregulated phone companies face making expensive upgrades in areas with few customers - customers wanting the kind of service other Americans get.

“We’re second- and third-class citizens,” said Paul Reimann, who at times hasn’t been able to call his son, who lives a stone’s throw down the road. “We’ve had 25 years of super hell with lines that aren’t good.”

Reimann is a longtime utility contractor who’s building a business selling classic cars. It’s based in New Mexico. Potential customers are worldwide. He’s anxious to get Internet service so he can advertise the vehicles.

Neighbor Jack Harold, who owns St. Maries Concrete, would settle for a phone that works all the time.

“We’ve had our phone service out quite a few times. Our business runs on the phone. I’ve lost one job because of this,” Harold said.

The area in question has 33 outdated analog lines. Complaints focus on two problems:

A lack of good voice phone service, which GTE is required by law to provide. Reimann acknowledged that some of his neighbors seem to have OK service, probably because the hardware serving their homes is in better shape.

A lack of high-speed digital lines that allow for data transmission.

Company officials disagree on the first point, and say the second problem is too expensive to fix. “The analog carrier provides standard voice-grade service at reasonable cost and, based on our trouble volumes, seems to be acceptable to most customers in the area,” company spokesman Bob Wayt said. “For those customers who want something else, we’d truly like to be able to make them happy. But investing $200,000 or more for so few customers just does not make good business sense.”

GTE spent $200 million in the past decade to upgrade its equipment in North Idaho, Wayt said. The eight-county territory encompasses 7,000 square miles and has only 140,000 phone customers. Last year’s project to extend fiber-optic cable from Worley to Harrison cost $450,000.

Crisscrossing the region with new cable doesn’t mean anything for customers who aren’t connected to it, such as those along the lower St. Joe River Road. The company is gradually upgrading rural phone service, but isn’t likely to reach that particular area soon, Wayt said. To get higher on GTE’s priority list, an area must be growing so rapidly that GTE can’t otherwise meet requests for phone lines.

Complaints are a consideration, too, Wayt said.

St. Joe River Road residents say they’ve called GTE for years about outages and poor-quality lines. Local manager Doug Shepherd said he couldn’t confirm the number of complaints without having a phone number for each account.

GTE has been slower to upgrade than other companies in the state, said Tanya Clark of the Idaho Public Utilities Commission’s consumer assistance division.

“The company just hasn’t been willing to make the investment in those areas to put in a higher grade of service,” she said. “GTE has told people, `If you want to get together and find a way to pay for this …”’ The PUC’s computerized records, which date to 1996, show 22 complaints about GTE service in North Idaho, two of which were from the St. Maries area.

“There were actually more than that, but some of them got resolved,” Clark said. “Those were strictly ones that they had no intention to upgrade service.”

In some cases, people complained that they had Internet service but lost it. That could be because additional customers were added nearby, slowing down connections, Clark said.

The PUC has no enforcement power over GTE, except when the company is not providing voice service.

St. Joe River Road resident Jim Robinson said he’s lucky to go a month without losing phone service.

“It’s just ridiculous,” he said. “They try to respond but they never get the problem alleviated.

“There’s been times when we really needed a phone and we just didn’t have it. About a year ago, my wife Karen’s sister passed away in Seattle. When she was really sick, we weren’t able to communicate. It was a real problem.”

If cell phone service was a little better in the fairly remote, hilly area, Robinson said, he’d drop GTE altogether.

Adrienne Darden said she had to get a cell phone to be sure she could stay in touch with her family, and “that costs an arm and a leg.”

She and her husband, Ron, moved to the St. Joe River Road in December.

“We were told we wouldn’t have phone service until February, the reason being they didn’t have a phone line for us. They did come toward the end of January and temporarily hooked up a line for us. Just a couple of weeks ago it got put in the ground,” she said.

“I do have a computer, but I can’t download anything. We can’t have a fax machine, and we’re starting a business.”

Her father-in-law, Jack Darden, got a $100 refund from GTE last year because his service had been poor. “There was so much static on it, you couldn’t hear anything,” he said. “The answering machine didn’t work at all. We called them every day for 30 days.”

Darden credits the local crew for working hard on repairs. “It’s probably the best it’s been, presumably because of the work they did.”

Darden would like to get a computer, but was told that the best Internet transmission rate he could get would be 19.5k, well below the standard 56.6k speed of new home computer modems. “It makes your download speed so long and so slow, that if you get a staticky glitch in your line, it drops you out.”

Reimann can’t always make a phone connection with his son, Mark, who lives just down the road. Upon the advice of GTE, Mark Reimann put in a second phone line to handle fax and computer transmissions. Neither have worked, his father said.

Paul Reimann is especially incensed that GTE installed a fiber-optic line on the power line that goes up the St. Joe River Road, and didn’t hook neighboring houses to it. Instead, he said, the utility hooked the residents into the old, worn-out line buried along the road.

The reason, GTE officials say, is that traditional copper lines can’t be spliced to fiber-optic cable without expensive connecting devices.

Reimann longs for the days of more heavily regulated monopoly utilities. Back in the early 1980s, he said, customer service came first and companies were guaranteed a reasonable profit. “Now they’re under such pressure to produce a profit at every quarter, or they have a new man in there.”

Reimann said his neighbors are looking to him to get the phone problems resolved. The plain-talking 73-year-old has a track record of taking on corporations and winning.

Reimann once grew mint in the Boise Valley. He was among Northwest farmers who sued the major toothpaste and chewing gum companies whose price-fixing, they said, was putting them out of business. He went into debt to fight the six-year case, he said, and he was among the last of the plaintiffs left standing after the companies began filing countersuits. But the farmers won a huge out-of-court settlement, he said.

He bought his land along the St. Joe River in 1974. He was stunned when it flooded unexpectedly. He ran to the neighbor’s house and learned that the land had been regularly inundated since World War II, when Washington Water Power Co. raised the level of the Post Falls Dam.

“I said `… you mean they can just put the water up whenever they feel like it?”’

Reimann was a contractor whose livelihood depended on the big regional power company. But he was outraged that farmers had never been compensated for the loss of productivity. He formed the Tri Rivers Association representing landowners along the three tributaries feeding Lake Coeur d’Alene. They sued, and won an undisclosed settlement in 1989.

These days, Reimann spends his winters in warmer places. The rest of the year he prefers to be beside the St. Joe River, in the house he built out of logs he milled.

Reimann hates the idea of hiring lawyers, spending precious time and risking his shaky health on a battle with another utility company. He won’t, however, consider leaving these rolling green hills in order to get modern phone service.

“Nobody will chase me off of anything. I’ll not move,” he said. “This is paradise.”