Fibrant, a community-owned fiber-to-the-home provider in Salisbury, N.C., has discovered the importance of redundancy. A major service outage knocked out phone and broadband service for several hours Monday, due to a fiber cut between Concord and Salisbury.  Fibrant’s provider, DukeNet, restored service after four and half hours by rerouting around the cable cut, but the incident left Fibrant looking for a backup provider to reduce the chance such a service outage will occur again.

City Manager Doug Paris, who was instrumental in getting Fibrant up and running in Salisbury, said the incident underlined the need to have redundancy to keep customers online.  While the city asks DukeNet for an explanation of the most recent service outage, Salisbury is taking bids for backup service.

Redundancy is a lesson virtually every service provider learns — commercial or otherwise.  What company has not suffered a significant service outage from an errant backhoe or construction crew severing a vital fiber link? Without a backup provider, service fails and customers howl.  Those companies experiencing multiple outages soon learn having a second provider can keep service disruptions to a minimum and more importantly make them invisible to customers.

Salisbury is located northeast of the city of Charlotte, N.C.

Paris told the Salisbury Post the city’s intent to contract with a second supplier has its benefits. A large educational institution has now signed up for service, with several potential new business customers considering Fibrant as well.

Fibrant has won a 13% market share in Salisbury, supplying phone, Internet, and cable TV to more than 1,700 customers.  Fibrant offers the fastest broadband service in the city and competes primarily with Time Warner Cable.  It also faces perennial opposition from anti “government broadband” critics, many nipping at the provider for political reasons.

Opponent John Bare has compared Fibrant to welfare, opposing it because it is not operated by the private sector.

But Fibrant has kept its competitors on their toes, forcing both the local cable and phone company to offer cut-rate deals for new customers and those threatening to switch.  Those low prices and retention deals have cut into Fibrant’s projected share of business in the community, but city officials note the customers who do sign up stay with the provider.  Fibrant has a 99% customer retention rate.

Fibrant’s biggest challenge remains its start up costs and debt.  The provider spends nearly $1,350 for each residential installation, for which it charges customers nothing unless they depart within a year of signing up.  Fibrant recoups installation and network construction costs from customers over time.  But the company does have plans to more aggressively market its service to Salisbury’s 34,000 residents in light of competitive offers from cable and phone companies.  Fibrant manages to win around 30 new customers a week.

Salisbury’s fiber network does not pitch customers “teaser rates” that rise considerably after the promotion expires. It prefers to market its superior speeds and service, and notes all of the revenue earned by Fibrant stays in the local community instead of being pocketed by Wall Street banks and investors.

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Now is the time to begin preparations for annual spring storms by making sure cell phones and other wireless accessories are ready and available for home and office use in the event of an emergency. According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, any basic emergency supply kit should include a fully-charged cell phone. WISH in Indianapolis talks with Verizon about how the company is responding to recent Indiana tornadoes and how it manages its network in storm-damaged regions.  (4 minutes)

A British advertising firm is paying homeless people to act as mobile hotspots for the 4G-challenged in a controversial pilot project that has left some wondering whether it is appropriate to use the disadvantaged as walking wireless access points.

The project took off at this week’s SxSW Interactive conference in Austin, Tex.  Anyone within 20 feet of a roving homeless person outfitted with a transmitting device can make a wireless connection with a 4G network.

BBH New York says it just wants to fill the need for better Internet connectivity at the convention center site.

“Our hope is to create a modern version of this successful model, offering homeless individuals an opportunity to sell a digital service instead of a material commodity,” BBH New York says. “SxSW Interactive attendees can pay what they like to access 4G networks carried by our homeless collaborators.”

BBH has 13 homeless volunteers walking around the convention center announcing they are available to facilitate immediate 4G access for data-hungry attendees.

“Hotspots, Hotspots! If you need to get online, I am your guy,” yelled one homeless volunteer to hundreds of people passing by.

Those who take them up on their offer can make donations for the access, which volunteers get to keep.

The company admits it has received some criticism from those who think the program exploits the homeless, but the company had no shortage of volunteers willing to participate.

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KXAN in Austin explores the “Homeless Mobile Hotspot” project that has a lot of people talking at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference.  (2 minutes)

Frontier Communications left dozens of businesses in the city of Rochester without phone service for well over a week because of a flooded cable the company struggled to repair.

Frontier says a flooded manhole along Interstate 490 was responsible for the outage, which primarily affected customers in the Park/Meigs Avenue District in southeastern Rochester.

But businesses are wondering why it took more than a week to bypass the damage and get phone service restored.

“We haven’t been able to get calls at all,” Stacy Ercan, owner of Stacy K Floral told WHAM News. “They have to forward our calls to the cell phone. But the cell phone can only answer one call at a time, so we’re definitely missing calls.”

“I’ve called 27 times in the last week [about the outage] and every time I get a different answer,” reported another business owner.

Some businesses say the Frontier service outage cost them more than inconvenience.  One owner reported up to an 80% drop in her business while others complained they were unable to process credit card transactions.

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WHAM in Rochester covers Frontier’s extended service outage that afflicted customers in southeast Rochester for over a week.  (2 minutes)

Cable "Digital Phone" Subscriber Numbers (Source: SNL Kagan)

Rick Munarriz has a bone to pick with Comcast after discovering his cable television and broadband service was out of commission.  It was the fourth prolonged outage in four weeks.  But the Comcast customer of more than a dozen years was surprised when he called the cable company and they immediately tried to sell him Comcast’s “digital phone” service:

[…] An otherwise cordial representative tells me that he’s looking into my account. I could save some serious money if I switch my landline to Comcast’s XFINITY Voice offering.

“If I did that, how would I be reporting this outage?” I asked.

“Don’t you have a smartphone?” he responds, not realizing that he has just killed his own sales pitch.

Who needs a landline when you have a wireless phone? Who needs a Comcast triple play — especially when I’m already dealing with two outs?

Although not losing customers as fast as traditional landline phone companies, cable-delivered phone service is no longer growing as fast as it once did.  Most companies picking up “digital phone” customers are winning them these days from product bundling, with aggressively priced triple-play packages of phone, Internet, and cable service.  Many of these packages include the phone line for less than $10 a month more than a double-play package of Internet and cable-TV.

SNL Kagan collects statistics from cable operators who pitch phone service and documents the highest growth in cable-provided phone service came during 2004-2009.  Now that growth has slowed.  Customers who were willing cut their landline phone off in favor of a cell phone don’t need wired phone service from the cable company either.

It seems Comcast is willing to admit the same, even when pitching its own phone product.