Allied Telesis @ Yokota Rocks/Sucks

After spending a fair amount of time researching the differences of services from US based companies vs. those being provided to the customers of Yokota Air Base we have come to the conclusion that Allied Telesis’s services are sub par and VERY VERY OVER PRICED.  Starting off with the basics, do you remember what clear television looked like?  Some of us have been stationed overseas so long that we forgot what a clear image looks like.  While we can most certainly agree that we did not expect a clear image from Armed Forces Network channels, you could almost agree to a “T” that we expect that our $50 a month service provide us the clearest picture possible.  I mean, we just don’t over pay for the luxury of watching FOX channels owned entertainment channels all day long, yes and I grouped FOX news into that category as well as I can’t seem to see it being anything more than an talk show to begin with.  That Glen Beck guy is nuts if you ask me.  Next thing you know, he’ll be publishing a pop-up-book as he treats his viewers like children.  Come on now visual aides and a chalk board, have we really reached that low for FOX News followers?  Better get back on topic huh?

So the picture is sub par, but what about the phone and internet services?  Well, the phone service for when it works is fairly decent though we have had better luck through Vonage and Skype for making long distance calls.  Their Premium Phone Plan for $50 a month and gives you 100 free calling minutes anywhere in the world is a complete joke.  If you signed up for the service, make sure you check the rates to ensure that you are not being fleeced.  I knew a guy who had a huge phone bill to one region and the GM suggested moving over to the Premium plan even though the person would have actually paid more per minute for those free 100 minutes than having just kept the basic plan.  Quite hilarious if you ask me.

Looking at the internet services, they are not a bad deal over all, though there are some worrisome aspects of the overall plan vs. user agreement and what it could mean to their customers should another service take off. 

• Basic Data – $24.95 monthly USD
  Speeds up to 256 Kbps with one e-mail account with 2 GB of storage. Great for checking email and chatting.
• Plus Data – $39.95 monthly USD
  Speeds up to 1.5 Mbps with (2) email accounts featuring up to 2 GB of storage per account. Great for reservations or doing research, and just the right tool for kids in school.
• Premium Data – $55.95 monthly USD
  Speeds up to 3 Mbps with (2) email accounts featuring up to 2 GB of storage per account. Perfect for viewing graphic-intense websites, sending and receiving pictures, shopping online, and catching up on news, sports and music without the wait.
• Premium Plus – $74.95 monthly USD
  Speeds up to 10 Mbps with (2) email accounts featuring up to 2 GB of storage per account. With 10 Mbps, there’s no lag time. Great for on-line gaming and bandwidth-intense video and audio applications.
• Ultra 15 – $74.95 monthly USD
  The ultimate in high speed! Speeds up to 15 Mbps with (2) email accounts featuring up to 2 GB of storage per account. Requires subscription to PlusTV Package.

If you look at Premium Plus, they promise no lag time for downloads and is suggested as a great package for bandwidth intensive users such as gamers, internet video watchers, etc.  Looking back at the user agreement when you first sign up Allied Telesis set an arbitrary bandwidth consumption (upload and download) of 30GB a month.  Well, for those bandwidth aware customers, you already know that you can blow through your 30GB’s in as little as 4 days if you are watching internet TV, downloading iTunes content, and more.  To boot, Allied Telesis only offers a 1Mbps upload rate meaning that should you decide to sign up for a service such as Mozy, a popular and affordable computer backup company, it could take you up to 60 days to backup that brand new computer you purchased with a 500GB hard drive.  Most companies offer equal download to upload ratios to their customers and it rumored that many of the new AAFES request for purchases at other installations require equal upload and download rates reaching speeds as high as 25Mbps.

Overall, Allied Telesis and AAFES are not offering any real advantage to their captive customer base aside from the fact they are the only show in town.  From the way it has been described to us, AAFES more or less pulled out all the stops to accomplish that feat.  It is not surprising though that their pricing is higher than most services available back in the states.  After all, AAFES is widely known to sell last years models for this years prices with alarming frequency and only adjust the price at the counter when you call them on it.

Once the GEM of the AAFES information services, AAFES has shifted its attention to other installations such as Misawa and Kadena now that there has been sufficient numbers of PCS’s which rid the serivce of their original angry and outspoken customer base with a customer base that is more flexible to a lower standard of service, after all, we are overseas as the saying goes.

If you have a paranoid side that sometimes wonders who is out there monitoring your internet traffic, have no fear, there is a solution out there for you.

Not a bad deal if you are going to be traveling a bit and are worried about those airport wireless connections or have some other concerns that are non-illegal activity in nature.  3 months of service for roughly $21.  I would say that for me, $7 a month is worth piece of mind.

Systems Perform Flawlessly During Power Outage

posted 11/21/2009 by Allied Telesis Public Relations

When: 11/22/2009 – 11/28/2009

November 22, 2009  Yokota Air Base, Japan

Allied Telesis announced today that Telephone and Data systems operated at 100% capability during the scheduled base-wide power outage on November 21st.  Planned maintenance work on the power systems for the base resulted in power outages ranging from one to six hours.

“While we routinely face localized power outages, it is less frequent that we encounter base-wide outages.  The procedures and systems that we have in place worked flawlessly during this event.  The result is that every network node remained operational throughout the entire outage with no loss of service to customers”, says Bruse Green, Yokota General Manager.

While a small number of trouble calls were received during the outage, the source of the trouble for the customer was determined to be the lack of local power.  The most frequent source of calls were cordless phones that require local power for operation and DSL modems which also require local power for operation.

Having a ’standard’ telephone in the home will insure continuous access to the telephone network during a local power outage and is advised for emergency purposes.  For customers who want to ensure continuous access to the Internet during a power outage, they should consider using a Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) for their DSL Modem.

After reading the above article on the Allied Telesis Yokota Portal site, we figured that a general polling of our readers would best answer our general question.

On Saturday, November 21, aside from a loss of service due to home equipmet not having power, did you experience any outage of basic phone services and/or cable?

• No (44%, 23 Votes)
• Was not home for an extended period of time. (35%, 18 Votes)
• Yes (21%, 11 Votes)

Total Voters: 52

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As Allied Telesis Yokota has turned up the heat for folks downloading content via P2P (peer to peer) applications with its most recent advertising campaign, Yokota still yearns to access content via its paid internet subscriptions through Allied Telesis.  I would wager a small sum that all the recent download concerns stems from Allied Telesis’s concern that there is too much bandwidth being consumed or that there are not nearly enough customers as anticipated interested in their movie channel offerings.  As typical, instead of correcting the underlying problem, Allied Telesis focuses attention at the customer vs. their own inadequacies.  Below are two ways how AAFES and Allied Telesis could correct their situation, though probably not in a way that would facilitate them making more profit.

• As when Allied Telesis first deployed their network at Yokota, their administrative functions all had US-based IP addresses which allowed them to conduct certain aspects of their operations easier.  Allied Telesis could very easily extend this courtesy to the residents of Yokota which would allow instant access to paid services through Xbox-Live, NetFlix, and more.  I suspect however, that this will not happen because it would increase bandwidth usage by leaps and bounds and more than likely would overwhelm the underdeveloped network that is in place now, again pointing out the inadequacies of their current deployment and that they have not completed roll-out as advertised.
• AAFES could use its considerable reach to redesignate the Allied Telesis network as an official DoD network, allowing companies who previously blocked content to open up access to Yokota Air Base customers.  However, again I suspect that this would end up costing Allied Telesis more due to the increased bandwidth use.

As the current user agreement states:

I bet that Allied Telesis is finding out that 30GB is about the average use by users a opposed to the extreme end.  With streaming video, Microsoft updates, video games, VoIP, Mozy like backup services, and more taking more and more bandwidth with each passing year, the 30GB limit that was first established by Americable Japan no longer applies it once did.  Now I would like to keep in mind that Allied Telesis has never come down on anyone who exceeded that amount by our knowledge, but the fact that the limit exists still is a cause of concern.  Back in the states, limits of 60GB to 120GB of “download” bandwidth are considered about normal.  Hell, if customers are complaining about Sprints cell phone “unlimited” data packet plan that has a 5GB limit as being too restrictive and that is a phone, one can only imagine what kind of bandwidth would a house with 2 or 3 computers would be pulling.

Regardless of what the true motivations are of Allied Telesis Yokota for suddenly hyper focusing on P2P applications, one thing remains constant.  It is 100% illegal to download pirated data.  Customers who use these types of applications should educate themselves with the risks they are taking and realize that there are serious consequences to be paid either in cash, career, or skin and in some cases all three if the offense is serious enough.

In the mean time, you can read about the Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act which provides information as to how your ISP can interact with you when they are notified by the lawyers of a copyright holder requesting an immediate cease and desist.  While I do not hold much on Wikipedia as gospel, these entries are fairly accurate as to how the proceedings occur.

For P2P users who choose to accept the risks associated, check out our new page called What’s On Tonight for your popular syndicated show fix.

**Message From Our Lawyer:  Allied Telesis Yokota Rocks/Sucks.org does not condone the use of P2P applications to acquire pirated materials.  We strongly discourage our readers from acquiring pirated materials and to purchase them via any online shopping venue.**

Thanks to a hot tip from a valued supporter, this nifty graphic proves that Allied Telesis Yokota is again more expensive that the US, Korea, and their home base of Japan.  In comparison to the US, 10Mbps subscribers are paying nearly $25 more a month in service.  In contrast to Japan which shows 10Mbps subscribers paying about $70 more a month in service.  What gives AAFES?  Where is that average stateside price we read about in our contract? Where is the supposed value?  Still waiting to see it considering Vonage, MagicJack, and Skype are still cheaper solutions to call to the states.  NetFlix, Hulu, iTunes, and AFN (you didn’t read that wrong) are still far superior in content and pricing comparison to our grainy analog cable services. 

Internet, the one thing that we can for 100% sure for cheaper off base is at least $30 to $70 a month more expensive and nearly 10 times slower on base.  Again I ask, where is the value?  Where is that money going?  It sure is not going to improve service, lower costs, or even give us the services promised during your initial advertising campaign for the AAFES telecommunication service PIPE DREAM.  Yep, you read that right Resilian! I called your failing experiments pipe dreams.  Why don’t you give up and close the doors of this AAFES offshoot.  You are not helping anyone aside from the AAFES dividend/tax collection machine which uses the hard earned dollars of US service members to subsidize services on bases such as the golf course, free internet at chow halls and billeting, and the new HDTV LCD screens that have been popping up all over services facilities for non-HD cable television services provided by none other than Allied Telesis Yokota.

Time to call it quits Resilian or start letting some competition come on base.  Your business model stinks to high heaven.  You should be letting these companies on base without having to pay an AAFES ransom considering the cost of deployment is so high.  As soon as the AAFES ransom gets put into place, we the “best customers in the world”  end up having to pay the price for your bull.  I bet you that service member’s will be much happier and complain much less if they had a choice.

I realize I seem a bit heated, but wouldn’t you be after you realize that your spouse’s hard earned check isn’t going nearly as far as it should be for the cost of service?  It only makes sense to demand more when less than 30 feet from your home the price for service drops $30+.  It isn’t fair, it isn’t right, and someone needs to be held accountable for this fiasco.  Perhaps the AAFES employee who let this happen and even was promoted for it should be held accountable the most.  It was his BS that allowed the fiasco in Korea to continue to spread through now Japan.  Let me ask you this AAFES, if it wasn’t for you forcing out other companies would you have any business at all?  Probably not.  You read the petition and pretty much ignored it and sadly the petition was for you to enforce your own contract.  Hope that you get nailed in an audit that that you can not manipulate through your perverse and very underserved political mafia power.  That way you’ll have to be held accountable for your misdeeds…and there are many.  Lucky for us authorized patrons that you do not run our health care system.  You would probably find a way to turn a buck on that too.

I honestly can not blame Allied Telesis Yokota for what is going on.  Though this site may be dedicated to point out where they do well and where they fail, it is really AAFES total lack of appropriate contract management that has resulted in this site being established.  Allied Telesis is only doing what AAFES allows them to do.  If AAFES held them to accountable to the letter of the contract and their own proposal, then things would differ greatly and this site would not even exist.  Stop blaming the creators of this site and calling them disgruntled and incapable of being satisfied when AAFES still has not done their part to enforce the contract.  AAFES has even gone to great lengths to continue to profit from this contract by misappropriating, in our opinion, Yokota’s MWR dividend funds to purchase time shifting servers for Allied Telesis after selling hundreds of TiVo’s to customers on Yokota who were attempting to obtain the service on their own. 

Anything for a buck, right AAFES?  Sure seems like it.  Rarely find a deal that doesn’t have strings attached.