‘It’s been unreliable:’ Families in St. Johns paying for internet that they say is not working

ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. — Families in a newly built St. Johns County neighborhood are dealing with frequent internet outages. It’s from a provider they’re required to pay for, with no option to opt-out, according to housing documents.

This impacts nearly 1,000 homes in the Beacon Lake Phase 4 development, built by Dream Finder.

Anthony Danielson said he and his wife paid for their internet up front, costing a little more than $450 for the year.

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“It’s been unreliable,” Danielson said. “It’s gone down for days at a time, frequently in the last two and a half months since I’ve been here. I think we’ve had 4 or 5 day-long outages.”

Danielson is one of several neighbors who contacted Action News Jax about the internet problems. Several families got together and filed a complaint to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) in August. The company that provides the internet, Fast Fiber Homes, acknowledges the complaint.

“The response from was generic as usual because we had another outage at the beginning of September,” one neighbor said.

“Working from home, it’s obviously been disruptive. In the middle of conference calls, the internet will just go down and I’m left scrambling,” Danielson said. “I’ve considered going to a secondary internet provider just so I have a backup internet.”

Danielson and other neighbors said there’s no option to opt out since it’s included in their HOA fees.

The new CEO of Dream Fiber, who operates Fast Fiber Homes internet, issued an apology via email to homeowners, saying in part, “The outages you have experienced is unacceptable.” The message continued to say that Dream Fiber had a change in CEO roles, and the new CEO is taking this issue seriously.

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The letter went on to say, “The outages you experienced were mainly due to fiber cuts and equipment failures with AT&T, our carrier partner responsible for the Internet backbone at Beacon Lake. When AT&T’s fiber services are disrupted, it impacts all our Beacon Lake customers. Additionally, the recent AT&T strike delayed their ability to dispatch a technician promptly over the weekend, resulting in an unacceptably long outage.”

Neighbors said these internet outages date back months.

The company put a backup plan in place over the weekend, using Space-X satellite, but neighbors said the bandwidth was incredibly slow.

“It was pretty useless,” Danielson said. “College football kicked off, and we had no internet over the weekend.”

Families said they want an opt-out option or a fix for the services.

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“We get a text message that says, ‘Hey, there’s an outage in your area,’ but then nothing else beyond that,” Danielson said. “Not a great explanation as to why.”

We reached out to the Lake Beacon HOA and Fast Fiber Homes on Thursday. We got this response on Friday from Randy Cosby, CEO of Fast Fiber Homes:

“As you mentioned in the online article, the outages are directly caused by failures on the high-capacity internet backbone connection we receive from the local carrier.  (Ironically, when these failures occurred, the carrier’s residential customers in this area did not seem to be affected.)  We not only continue to work with AT&T to resolve the recurring problems with their circuit but have also contracted with a secondary carrier to bring in another even higher capacity backbone connection. The new circuit is under construction and will not only provide a backup route to the internet, but will also increase capacity for future growth.

In the meantime, we have deployed a temporary backup connection via satellite, so residents can access essential internet services even if the carrier fiber goes down again.  During the most recent carrier outage, we found that the satellite connection was not sufficient, so we have made additional upgrades this week to greatly increase the available backup capacity. Work is underway to get additional short-term backup connections in place as well. While we hope there is not another carrier fiber failure, we are doing all we can to provide reliable, fast internet to Beacon Lake residents. We will continue to work with the HOA to ensure all the residents get the service what they are paying for, and more.”

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