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Published on 03/08/1999 All articles from this issue

Residents offer views on town cable TV

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By Merle Baruch

Special to the Town Crier

Los Altos Hills residents expressed dissatisfaction about current cable TV service at the March 4 Los Altos Hills City Council meeting.

Sun Country Cable is selling its system to Sun Tel Communications and the transfer requires the consent of the town. The Los Altos Hills City Council invited the public to comment on the current cable television service in preparation for the item to be considered by the city council at its meeting on March 18.

"The reliability and reception is not good," said resident Harry Emerzian. "There are outages all the time, including tonight."

When asked what kind of a response he receives when he calls to complain, he replied that even though they do answer within three minutes it is not always a real person who answers.

Jim Schram, another resident, agreed with Emerzian about the intermittent reliability.

He also felt that the signal quality is an issue and complained about not being able to access a financial cable channel he needs for work.

Modem and Internet access were high interest areas for residents, who wanted to know when they would become available.

Richard Lamparter said that one-way cable modem access is available now. He would like to see high-speed uploading and downloading so modem access could be two ways.

"I would like to see comparable pricing from other cable services," Diane Barrager said.

Questions from the council Members to the representative of Sun Country Cable included whether there is a way to hookup with neighboring cable stations, Foothill College, and Stanford University stations.

The company representative did not respond to any of these questions or concerns at the March 4 meeting, but will be required to do so at the March 18 meeting.