As a local company, SVI believes in providing great customer service
Published in the July 22 – Aug. 4, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Elise Brentnall stands in front of a server system at South Valley Internet’s headquarters in San Martin. The company got its start in 1994.
Photo by Marty Cheek
In 1994, full-text web search engines (which would eventually lead to Google) came out. Mosaic, an early browser, was starting to popularize the World Wide Web. Modems providing 14.4 kilobit service were considered fast enough for most users and capable of handling email. The Internet was barely starting to get into the American zeitgeist that pivotal year when a communications service provider company called South Valley Internet got its start in San Martin.
In the more than two decades since those digital wild west days, the Internet expanded to connect the entire world in an intricate network of information distribution, shaping media and culture everywhere. And SVI continues to provide quality service from San Martin as a local telecommunications company that provides both Internet and voice services to customers in Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy and Hollister as well as nationwide.
“We are a local company,” said co-owner and chief operating officer Elise Brentnall. “We live and work in the same community, and we care about it. And we give good customer service — that’s what differentiates us from our competitors. You can come in and see us from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, and it’s the same people who answer the phones in the evening for after-hours support that you speak to during the day.”
Brentnall says it’s a “funny story” how SVI got started at a time when the technology of the Internet was still a mystery to most Americans.
Her father Bob Brentnall, a pilot for Northwest Airlines, had a friend named Roy Engehausen who was a senior network architect for IBM. They were both ham radio operators and interested in communication technology.
“Roy brought the idea to Bob about starting a POP, and dad asked, ‘What’s a POP?’” Brentnall said.
Engehausen explained that it was an acronym for “point of presence” — or a physical location that people can telephone to tap into the Internet, she said.
“And the rest is history,” she said. “They put some feelers out to the community to see if the people here might be interested in an ISP and the response was overwhelming. So, that’s how SVI got started.”
Why put SVI in San Martin, a village of less than 2,000 people in 1994? At the time, customers paid a toll to call from Gilroy to Morgan Hill and vice versa. But both could call San Martin for free, which meant they could get on the Internet and not be billed by GTE or Continental (the two carriers at that time). It also helped that Bob Brentnall lived in San Martin.
South Valley Internet is what is considered a CLEC — a competitive local exchange carrier. Verizon or AT&T are ILECs — an incumbent local exchange carrier.
The significant difference between the two is that Verizon and AT&T get tax dollars to maintain the existing infrastructure in the area that they support while companies like SVI do not.
CLECs were started in 1996 by the Telecom Act of that year, Brentnall said.
Congress created them to bring customers better communication services at cost effective prices.
Besides the Internet, SVI provides voice services from traditional phone lines to wireless at very competitive prices. No carrier in the area can match SVI’s speeds, Brentnall said. Verizon’s fastest is 15 megabits per second while SVI’s is 100 megabits per second depending on the distance from the central office, she said.
Over its 21 years, SVI has seen the Internet evolve from a hobbyist activity to a ubiquitous information system that shapes our daily lives and the course of the global culture.
“We thought dial-up modems that were 25 kilobits were really fast and now megabits are nothing,” Brentnall said. “We’re well on our way to much, much faster. I remember helping my father install modems in a rack, and that was my first experience of an electronic burning smell which is very, very unique. We were literally taking modems out of their shell, their case, and mounting them on a rack. Then when customers called in, it would just sequence one after the other after the other. And now here we are today using some of the newest and greatest technology.”
Despite bringing in the latest technology, SVI believes in a business philosophy of personal customer service, she said.
“When you call in and talk to somebody not only in your same time zone but more than likely in the same city or the neighboring city, you’re going to run into this person in the grocery store,” she said. “You’re going to see people who work for SVI out in the community.”
