Subscribe[Updated 11:04pm EDT]
Sunday’s massive service outage, impacting hundreds of thousands of customers from Maine to western New York, left large numbers of “Digital Phone” customers without access to emergency services.
No phone service meant that people trying to call 911 for an emergency were out of luck.
The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office issued a press release stating that all Montgomery County residents with Time Warner phone lines had to report in person to their local fire department, EMS, or police station in case of an emergency. Public safety officials note that elderly customers often lack backup cell phone services or other means to contact emergency officials when service outages occur.
Time Warner Cable Spokesperson, Robin Wolfgang, told WKBW Buffalo, “there was a problem with a main switching device at their Syracuse hub station.”
She said crews isolated the problem, fixed it and rebooted computers. She said at 1:15 p.m. that service had been restored for many customers, but scattered reports continue to arrive as late as tonight that outages persist in some areas.
The Road Runner website failed to mention the outage on their “network status” page as of earlier today. Those attempting to call Time Warner were met with constant busy signals, recordings that “all circuits are busy,” or a general recorded message indicating they were aware of the outage, but offered no information about its cause or timeline when service might be restored.
Time Warner’s owned and operated news stations offered limited coverage. R-News in Rochester had still not mentioned the outage as of late this evening. YNN in Buffalo doesn’t seem to have a website. Capital News 9 in Albany also failed to report on the outage as of this afternoon. News 10 in Syracuse offered two sentences, after the problem had been fixed:
CENTRAL NEW YORK — A Time Warner Cable spokesman says High Speed Data and digital phone service have been restored after an interruption this morning. The company says a piece of equipment needed to be repaired. The problem was fixed within three hours.
In contrast, more extensive coverage could be found from broadcast news in Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, as well as reports in several newspapers.
The North Country Gazette suggested customers not put all of their eggs in Time Warner’s basket:
No, you couldn’t jump on the Internet and contact Time Warner and no, you couldn’t call Time Warner if you are stupid enough to have your phone service through them. If you needed to call 911 for an emergency and had digital phone service from Time Warner, you were out of luck.
For nearly two hours, Time Warner wouldn’t answer calls, wouldn’t acknowledge there was a problem, saying that due to the high volume of calls, they were unavailable. Tell me, if they’re not taking calls, then how and why do they have such a high volume? What do their technicians do doing a prolonged outage? Go out for coffee? Play poker or Monopoly, maybe Clue of what’s causing the outage? What?
Other stories of interest:
- Road Runner/Digital Phone Outage In Northeast
- News 14 Carolina/Soviet TV: Time Warner Newscast Promotes Time Warner Caps
- Time Warner: No Tiers, No DOCSIS 3 — Customers: Shucky Darn
- Time Warner Tosses Customers Powerboost Bone? Now Hit Your Usage Cap Faster Than Ever!
- WOAI San Antonio – Time Warner Customers Learn of the New 1GB Granny Tier
VOIP is just trouble just waiting to happen. With 80% of people having copper or cell phones I dont see a point.
To be fair anything can happen. If some switch decides to go south it happens. For the few that remember when VOIP first came out 911 was not in the deal it was later forced on them by washington. I guess the only way to cover ones butt is to have a copper phone and a cell phone but with cell your paying mega bucks for something you may not use, you may have a pre pay cell only to find out the minutes you bought expired. The leaches are always in your pockets. In a perfect world if I bought 100 minutes I should be able to use them today, tomorrow, or next year. Somebody got the idea minutes were like a chopped bag salad it rotted in a week. No sorry minutes do not rot.
Ehh, to be honest, at this point, it is just as reliable as anything else. Outages happen on everything, even copper phones. It is how the companies handle them that make people angry or nuetral.
I am a strong supporter of VOIP phones. We use MagicJack here and it serves us well. And to be fair, anything can happen…even to regular phone service. Equipment and/or power failures can happen at any time. I do not think that it is fair to be picking on Time Warner at this time in regard to this particular issue.
Entirely true. When the October Storm slammed Buffalo a few years ago, the remote POTS/DSLAM for my Verizon landline was knocked out for a day (it had to be repaired), which left me with no phone nor DSL service at that home, and I ended up using the Frontier line for internet and phone. I do know for a fact that the standard telephone system via copper (POTS) does have quite a bit of redundancy to it, where if a main trunk line at a CO were to go down, typically another trunk line heading to another CO someplace will be available to take the additional load. But things do happen, and simply due to the nature of VoIP or “Digital Phones”, someone should always have a backup solution such as a basic POTS line with their telephone company or a cellular phone.
I’m just as anti-tier and corporate greed as the next guy but, I’ve got to say this kind of smacks of dog piling. Bad timing for something that can, and does happen and is, or should be a known risk of VOIP. If an unplanned outage happens and people only have TWC digital phone how does someone expect them to notify their customers, start driving door to door? Yeah they have their cable news channel, but if my internet and phone go out and the support lines are busy, I’m not flipping on R News (or locally in NC channel 14) for an explanation, I can put 2 and 2 together and figure something exploded somewhere and it’ll be fixed when they can. Maybe I’m just too reasonable of a subscriber.
And as far as blaming them for not taking calls, does any company staff on a Sunday morning in numbers adequate for a customer base from Maine to Buffalo to call at once? This may be PR Karma for all the tier garbage and DOCSIS 3.0 hissy fit, but no ISP who also offered VOIP service would be staffed to handle this. Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc. wouldn’t have done any better than TWC in this situation.
So yeah there’s a little blood in the water here, but let’s elevate ourselves a little bit and handle in a reasonable fashion.
edit: Quick edit, glad to see that most comments so far have been measured and reasonable in their response to this. So yeah, go readers of stopthecap.com
Tormut: “Maybe I’m just too reasonable of a subscriber” No it shows you a level headed user of Stop The cap as most are. This is not a war between us it is a war between us and ISP’s.
Ron and Maz as you can see from my second post I was not picking on any VOIP service provider. VOIP is the most vulnerable with no cable connection or loss of power. Cell is the least vulnerable at the moment with copper somewhere in the middle. My internet connection was dead but my copper phone still worked. There is never a perfect solution unless one has tin cans and a string. Ever try that it works Takes me back to the days of the crystal radio as a kid. Now there is so much RF around here just hook up ten feet of wire to a neon2 bulb and ground the other side it glows. Shows lightning to. lol
Im dating myself old
After what happened a few years ago, twice, I’ll never use their all in one package again. Get home from work and all 3 are out, didn’t come back on until after I went to bed. So no TV, no internet and no phone, good thing I had a few new DVD’s to watch lol.
Larry ill tell you about TW TV. You may have 1000 channels but I bet you watch maybe 10. Every year they come out with a new set of user channels Like BET2 or the Iran channel where only 5 people watch but they use that as an excuse to charge more. Anything worth watching is always PPV or loaded with 50 percent ad’s. Here I do not use TV I hooked up to a cable with a couple of splitters and a few fittings. I pay about $40 a month including that $1 charge because the bill is split two ways. I found it funny the TV person was paying for useless content, the cable box and even a charge for the remote. Well that is their problem not mine. If you like to play if your bill is $40 flat send them $40.01 that kills that dollar charge as their billing system tries to figure it out. Learned that years ago. Companies much larger then TW fell by the sword with what they did. My vision of the future: NFL will cost you per game, Every show will cost you. The only thing that will be free are the ad’s that im very good at filtering out. If it shows up on the screen I can capture it and edit it. They hate people like me.
We have our cells as backups. With MagicJack, that is especially important. LOL. But in all fairness, MagicJack for us works very well 98 % of the time. And for $19.95 for the whole year ( less than $2 a month ) MagicJack could fail as a company for all I care. I wouldn’t worry a bit about losing a whole $20.
So yes, anyone with the TW phone or any other VOIP phone should have a backup…even if it is a Tracphone or something like that.
Maz maybe we / you should post options to this madness. There is very much im not aware of for options but will listen to a page of oprions. thanks
I’m happy to add to that. I use ViaTalk based near Albany, NY. They have monthly plans, but I pay one year in advance for $200 which comes out to $16 a month for 1 line (though they claim you can have a 2nd ‘virtual’ line – never tried to use it) with every feature you can imaging including a user-managed blocklist and voicemail. You get unlimited local and long distance in the U.S. and Canada. It blows TW Digital Phone out of the water and my favorite feature is if the network is unreachable (i.e. their servers can’t connect to your phone adapter) then they re-route the call to an alternate number you provide (such as a cell phone). So while there was an outage this morning, the couple calls I had came through on my cell. They also support e911 (not sure if Digital Phone from TW does or not).
I’ve been through Vonage, Sunrocket, and now ViaTalk. Their customer support is great (usually get to a person within 2 minutes on a busy day) and they are very polite. Best part is VoIP isn’t their primary business but it’s very close to their primary business (web hosting) which means that they’re not basing their entire business on VoIP (like Vonage — losing money — or SunRocket — went under) and have been around for about 9 or 10 years now.
I agree, maybe Phil can collect a bunch of VoIP alternatives from Digital Phone since anyone who uses Digital Phone should be able to port their number to another VoIP provider easily (well, TW can make it a slow process, but no worse that porting a number from Frontier; ~ 1 month for me with my previous number auto-forwarding to my temporary number).
Options, nice spelling ken
There is no excuse for Time Warner to not have placed a crawler on their RNews channel with information on todays outage. It would have been a simple way to communicate to their subscriber base. However, I suspect they somehow feel it is a sign of weakness to acknowledge any failings. S___ happens, so please just acknowledge it and be honest. We will all understand. The truth is only an enemy to the paranoid.
I wholeheartedly agree. A crawler at the bottom of the screen on RNews would have been the right thing to do. This was a very wide spread outage and RNews has totally ignored it. uncalled for.
Bingo! I don’t blame them for having a failure (assuming that it wasn’t their fault), but the way they handled this mess leaves a lot to be desired. Like many companies, they seem to operate under the assumption that if they don’t acknowledge something it didn’t really happen.
Something in Syracuse failed. And that is what caused many areas to lose service. So it wasn’t the fault of the local TW folks. And yes, they should have acknowledged it on their RNews channel. I had the channel on for a bit this morning during the outage and saw quite a few commercials for Roadrunner … but no news about RR being down. LOL
This is probably the first of many soon to come “failures” which will later come to be blamed on heavy downloaders. This is just the start of the propaganda machine.
I refuse to subscribe to this “theory”. There is no conspiracy. This outage affected many more folks than just us in the Rochester area.
Granted, its the first time this has happened in a long time. But, it comes on the heels of statements like “the internet will begin to experience brownouts” by TWC executives.
“For good reason. Internet demand is rising at a rate that could outpace capacity within a few years. According to industry analysts, the infrastructure may not be able to accommodate the explosion of online content by 2012. . .This could result in Internet brownouts. . If we don’t act, consumers’ Internet experience will suffer. Sitting still is not an option.”
- Landel Hobbs TWC COO
This wasn’t a brown out, this was a black out. A brown out wouldn’t have been as widespread or as long (in terms of power brown outs you don’t lose power completely, you just get less of it and all your lights dim but don’t usually go out).
It’s a coincidence, nothing more. If they are stupid enough to use this as an opportunity to push for caps then (and only then) do they really deserve to go down in flames and have everyone abandon their Ship of Misfortune.
I understand what a brownout vs a blackout is. I was simply pointing out the possible connection between Hobb’s statement and this failure. The idea of comparing a packet-switched network to an electrical grid is misleading to begin with.
Time Warner is not ready for prime time but charges you as if they are
Not that I am a conspiracy theorist, but I would not put it past TW to pull a stunt like this and then come back and say “See…we told you that we needed to gouge you for your internet service or things like this would start to happen…”
It is interesting that this happened not too long after their teir plan bubble was popped…now granted, it did affect other markets as well…but c’mon…would anyone put it past them?
That would be bad timing given how many are now informed and the pressure now put in front of them. I do think it was a real problem. If local officials or the government got one whiff of something shady the fur would fly. It might have been a Sunday but e commerce was still running, emergency services were still working as well. We now have a flu that I think many people like to keep track of and so many other issues. I do not know the dollar cost but im sure officials were not happy. Commerce is now a main driving factor in today’s internet. The internet should be regarded as a nation interest like gas and water commerce and national security.
Well i just missed a very nice job becausei didnt know they called me till just now when i noticed on my tv they called but my phones didnt work. i borrowed a friends cell phone and now im pissed. i just lost a job. back to dishwashing.