YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan — While some Yokota residents have praised Allied Telesis’ intentions and recent channel improvements, many say they’d prefer alternatives for their cable television, Internet and telephone needs. Others said they still experience sporadic Internet outages, sluggish speeds and difficulty accessing wireless. Dropped telephone calls and bad connections also occur periodically.
"I’ve quit calling for help because it doesn’t do any good," said a woman who asked not to be identified, saying she didn’t want to get her active-duty husband in trouble. "It seemed like they promised a lot but caused more problems instead. Here, we don’t have a choice, and if you want a phone, you have to use them."
During an October 2006 town hall meeting, Allied said it planned to bring in a 60-channel lineup broadcasting live feeds through a fiber-optic link in San Francisco. Digital video recorders would be available for an added cost and would offset the time difference.
Later plans called for a full four-tier package to be rolled out sometime between July and September 2007. The premium cable lineup actually didn’t take shape until this past summer, but there are now 71 channels broken into two tiers — basic and premium.
In May, "time-shifting" for U.S. programs was proposed for the first time by Allied. But today, the servers have yet to go online, and AAFES is selling TiVo units at the base exchange.
"They promised it and promised it. Then we got TiVos on sale instead," said Senior Airman Christopher Badger, 25, a dorm resident who arrived at Yokota in February. "It’s too expensive for me to justify buying to watch three hours of TV a day. … After a couple months, I canceled [premium] TV because of the infomercials in prime time. Then I came back around in May when Allied Telesis said time-shift servers were coming."
Badger said he likes the new channel selections — particularly Spike and Cartoon Network — and the price is good compared to what he paid in the States.
But he’s more peeved about last month’s problems with inbound calls. His uncle died in September, but he didn’t hear about it until three days later, he said.
Senior Airman Luke Hickman and his wife, Candise, who moved to the base about six months ago, have mixed feelings. She wants to see American shows in the evening and get more consistent telephone service. He likes having a U.S. phone number with unlimited calls back home under the basic plan and also has no problems with the Internet.
"We make a lot of calls and would really run up a bill if we didn’t have a stateside number," Luke Hickman said. "They also have a pretty good [channel] selection for being over here. A couple more movie channels like HBO or Cinemax would be nice."
Tech. Sgt. Fereeda Seunath said she and her family "don’t even bother" trying to use wireless Internet anymore in their tower apartment. They also said they keep getting busy signals on international calls. "We recently found out it’s an Allied Telesis problem," she said.
Seunath said she’s "still willing to give [Allied] the benefit of the doubt" but admits frustration waiting for premium cable channels to show up.
"We had no problems with Americable," she said of the former base cable TV and broadband Internet provider. "They’re everywhere else but Yokota, and everywhere else has great service. I’m online sometimes, and it still goes down. Two years later, Allied is still working out basic kinks. It hasn’t materialized the way they said it would."
