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Cable service meltdown brings in customer static
COHOES -- The single pipeline that increasingly delivers phone, television and Internet services into homes and businesses has advantages -- except when it doesn't.
When it goes down, only one company has to be called to get things repaired. The catch is you might not be able to reach anyone to arrange the repairs.
A fire Tuesday that tore through a popular bakery in Cohoes left 70,000 Time Warner Cable subscribers without TV service. Some who also rely on the cable company for their high-speed Internet or telephone found all three out of commission.
That sparked a flurry of calls to the company, and not everyone got through.
Peter Taubkin, vice president of government relations and public affairs for Time Warner's Albany operations, said crews responded quickly to reroute the services, which affected about 20 percent of its Capital Region customers. Most customers were back up by 11 p.m. Tuesday, he said.
About 15,000 customers lost service again Wednesday morning as the repairs continued, but most of that was back shortly after 9 a.m., he said.
"Our service rests on its quality, its reliability and its value," Taubkin said. "Obviously when you have episodes like this, there's nothing you can do other than restore services as soon as possible."
Anne Dalton, a spokeswoman with the Public Service Commission, said the PSC had not received consumer complaints about the outage Wednesday.
The PSC doesn't regulate the phone or Internet portions of the cable company's operations, but Dalton said Time Warner's cable services met state requirements.
Cable deregulation in the 1990s cleared the way for Time Warner and others to begin providing a host of other services. For most customers in the Capital Region, separate companies still deliver services independently through separate pipelines.
But increasingly, many are opting for one pipeline and one bill.
Time Warner rolled out its Internet phone service in the Capital Region in 2004. Phone giant Verizon Communications Inc. is busy running fiber optics to homes and businesses in the region, capable of one day delivering television services as well.
Both cable and telephone providers tout the high volume of data that fiber can carry. Tuesday's fire illustrated the drawback of putting so much volume through one point.
The fire started at the back of the Golden Krust bakery before 5 p.m. By 7, flames were spewing out of the front of the structure, baking a Time Warner fiber-optics line strung along street poles.
The line failed, and the cable company began to hear from customers.
Subscribers in parts of Rensselaer, Saratoga and Washington counties lost parts or all of their services that night.
The company plans to credit customers for the down time, though calculations were still being worked out Wednesday. |