Thousands of customers across northeast Massachusetts from Tewksbury to Rockport have been without Internet and phone service since early Monday after a mattress being used by a homeless man caught fire adjacent to Verizon’s copper and fiber optic cables on a bridge that crosses the Merrimack River.

”Your communications services may have been interrupted due to a fire in Lawrence that damaged a major cable providing service to your community,” Verizon’s dispatch manager Donna Powers wrote in letters sent to officials in the affected communities.

The outages are impacting communities including Gloucester, Manchester, Rockport, Essex, Littleton, Lawrence, Andover, North Andover and Tewksbury, and points in-between.

With high-capacity fiber circuits out of action, regional calls and certain Internet services were disrupted. Verizon is giving priority to restoring network operational and surveillance circuits, high-capacity fiber backbone circuits, and 911.

Verizon will not give a time frame when it expects to fully restore service, although the company indicated it is now rotating crews continuously to restore service to individual homes and businesses in the Lawrence and North Andover areas.

Lawrence Fire Chief Jack Bergeron said the problem started with a lit cigarette disposed on a vagrant’s mattress, which was on fire by the time firefighters arrived on scene. The mattress was on top of conduits that contained the copper and fiber cables, despite signs marked “danger” and “high-voltage.”

With no redundant backup facilities, a major outage can leave customers without service for days until repairs are completed.

THE Internet Overcharger

Cable One, one of the nation’s most notorious, usage-capped broadband providers, has left thousands of Columbus, Miss. subscribers without phone, Internet, and cable television service since 6pm Sunday night, unable to repair the problem until a part arrives at the local cable office.

The Dispatch reports a steady stream of people, unable to get answers from Cable One over the phone, have been showing up at the company’s local cable office from the time it opened for business this morning, all looking for answers.

Cable One General Manager David Lusby said he had no idea how many customers were affected by the outage or when the cable system would be back up and running. Those are not the answers customers want to hear, particularly for customers depending on Cable One for their local businesses. Local shops have been unable to process credit card transactions, cannot make or receive calls, and are relying on personal cell phones for basic connectivity with the outside world.

New Hope resident Walter Worthy is fed up with Cable One’s bad service, calling the company’s broadband service “spotty” for more than a month.  Worthy told the newspaper he would rather have AT&T’s DSL service if he could, but AT&T has shown no interest extending service in his neighborhood.

One ex-customer named Matt told the newspaper he finally dropped Cable One Internet service that cost $65 a month for the same reason.

Cable One maintains one of the most arcane Internet “Fair Use” policies in the country, with broadband usage limits that apply to both daily and monthly usage:

Another limit applies to monthly usage:

The combination of poor service and a confusing Internet Overcharging scheme resulted in the cable operator experiencing a loss in broadband customers, almost unprecedented for cable companies. Cable One said goodbye to 1,017 high-speed Internet and 9,610 basic video subscribers during the second quarter, according to its owner, The Washington Post.

Communities like Natchez, Miss. are responding by attempting to shorten its franchise renewal with the company, which typically runs 10 years.

Ward 3 Alderwoman Sarah Smith foresees the contract being renewed but isn’t certain she wants the city’s digital future tied to Cable One for the next decade.

“Technology is changing so fast, I just don’t see us having any contract for as long as 10 years,” Smith told the Natchez Democrat.

Smith notes local residents have regularly complained about Cable One’s service, and the city has considered the possibility of letting another operator take over in the area, but has found no takers.

“We’re not going to be on the top of the radar for every service to be here,” Smith said.

More importantly, it is unprecedented for another major cable provider to displace a current operator, no matter how poorly they provide service.

Warren County

CenturyLink left Warren County, Ohio’s 911 system out of service for more than 15 hours after a 70 mph derecho blew across the region in late June, eventually forwarding emergency calls to confused operators at a 911 center in another county at the other end of the state. When local officials asked CenturyLink to attend a meeting to explain what happened, they never showed up.

Now Commissioner Dave Young wants CenturyLink kicked out of the county, turning 911 services over to a provider that actually answers their phone.

“I want to switch sooner rather than later,” Young said. “The way this went down and the response we got from CenturyLink and now three weeks later we still don’t know the reason? We call our liaison and her solution to the 911 system being down is keep calling the 800 number. There’s something wrong there.”

Young was particularly peeved that CenturyLink did not send a representative to a meeting investigating the lengthy outage.

“So essentially they blew us off this morning,” Young said.

Geauga County

During the outage, callers initially heard nothing after dialing 911. Sometime later, someone at CenturyLink reprogrammed the equipment to forward calls from the Warren County 911 system in southwest Ohio to distant Geauga County’s 911 center in northeast Ohio near Cleveland, surprising operators.

Initial reports blame inexperienced technicians, human error, and understaffing at CenturyLink. Young wants the contract transferred to another provider with a better track record.

CenturyLink’s errors left Warren County without 911 service from 5:15pm until 8:30am the following day. County officials later learned the technician assigned to work on the problem did not actually commence repairs until 3:30am — more than 10 hours after the outage was first reported.

“CenturyLink is confident we can come to a resolution on this issue.” said Joanette Romero, spokeswoman for the company.

Greenwich Village business owner Louis Wintermeyer has spent the last three months without phone or broadband service from Verizon Communications.

“It is hard to believe it has gone on this long,” Wintermeyer told the New York Post. “You feel like you’re in Bangladesh here. I mean we’re in the West Village!”

Across Manhattan, and well into upstate New York, Verizon customers who start experiencing landline problems often keep experiencing them for weeks or months on end.

Wintermeyer couldn’t wait that long — he relocated his car-export company to his Rockland County home. Another Verizon customer in the same building — the Darling advertising agency, experienced intermittent outages adding up to 10 weeks of no service since February.

“We really sounded like amateurs,” Jeroen Bours, president of the Darling advertising agency told the Post. “We would be in a conference call, and all of a sudden the call would go. It just doesn’t really make a good impression.”

In the Adirondack hamlet of Wanakena, when the rain arrives, Verizon service leaves a lot to be desired.

One person’s phone may be working but the one next door will be completely out of service or crackly at best, according to local residents.

“It’s almost comical,” Ranger school director Christopher L. Westbrook told the Watertown Daily Times. “It’s so bizarre because some phones will be working while others are not.”

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WWNY Watertown Phone Situation Improving Officials Say 8-3-12.mp4[/flv]

A fiber optic line cut near Cicero, N.Y. in early August disrupted phone and cellular service from Verizon across the North Country. WWNY in Watertown covers the event.  (1 minute)

One Adirondack Park Agency commissioner who lives in the area says he has been without a phone 15 times in the last two months. Unfortunately for North Country residents, cell phone service is often not an option, because carriers don’t provide reliable wireless service in the region.

Local businesses cannot process credit card transactions, broadband service goes down, and a handful of privately-owned pay phones out of service for months have been abandoned by their independent owner because of the ongoing service problems.

Verizon repair crews come and go, but affected customers report a real reluctance by Verizon technicians to complete repairs once and for all.

“The permanent fix is not happening,” says Angie K. Oliver, owner of the Wanakena General Store.

Bours said one Verizon technician told him the company no longer cares about its older copper wire landline business. Rural residents upstate sense the company has little interest spending money on deteriorating infrastructure.

Some Wanakena residents suspect Verizon has thrown in the towel in St. Lawrence and Franklin counties, where independent Nicholville Telephone subsidiary Slic Network Solutions is constructing over 800 miles of fiber optic cable and operates a fiber to the home broadband and phone service.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WWNY Watertown Lewis County Phone Service Restored 8-20-11.mp4[/flv]

Last summer, Lewis County suffered a similar widespread phone service outage that left businesses and homes without service for days.  WWNY says Barnes Corners was hardest hit.  (1 minute) 

Verizon spokesman John J. Bonomo blamed lightning strikes for the problems in Wanakena, but said the cable serving the area was intact and should not be responsible for service outages.

Gray

Near Syracuse University, some businesses and residents were without phone service for nearly two weeks in June.

The largest outage began when more than 150 customers around SU lost service after a storm. More than a week later, nearly two dozen customers were still without service, including the 4,000 member U.S. Institute for Theater Technology.

A damaged underground phone cable was deemed responsible, but repairs were slow.

Earlier this month, Massena town supervisor Joseph Gray fired off a letter to the deputy Secretary of State after a major Verizon line north of Syracuse was damaged, cutting off landline and cell phone service throughout Jefferson and St. Lawrence counties.

“I would have called your office to speak with you directly, but I couldn’t because our telephone service was unavailable,” Gray wrote. “Since I became supervisor of the town of Massena just over two and a half years ago, on at least three different occasions telecommunications in the entire North Country has been thrown into chaos because a Verizon fiber optic cable was cut 150 miles from here. Many of us found our emergency services, business, residential, and cellular telephone service interrupted, not to mention disabled credit card machines, facsimile machines and Internet service in some cases.”

Gray criticized the Public Service Commission for allowing Verizon to operate without service redundancy in the state, providing backup facilities if a fiber cut occurs.

“As a result, the Public Service Commission (which perhaps should be given a different name if my experiences with them is typical), has done nothing to address this dangerous situation and, more incredibly, appears unwilling to acknowledge that the problem exists,” Gray said.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman blasted Verizon’s poor landline service in a petition sent to the New York State Public Service Commission. Schneiderman called Verizon’s service unacceptable in New York, with customers forced to wait inordinate periods to get service restored.

“Verizon’s management has demonstrated that it is unwilling to compete to retain its wireline customer base, and instead is entirely focused on expanding its wireless business affiliate,” said Schneiderman’s office.

Schneiderman’s office filed evidence in July that Verizon was undercutting its landline business in New York and diverting money for other purposes:

• Verizon’s claim it had spent more than $1 billion in investments to its landline network was misleading: Roughly three-quarters of the money was actually spent on transport facilities to serve wireless cell sites and ongoing spending on FiOS in areas already committed to get the fiber-to-the-home service;
• Verizon investment in landlines has declined even faster than its line losses. The dollars per access line budgeted for 2012 is one-third less than the investment for the 2007-2009 period;
• In just a five month period, 19.5% of the company’s 4.3 million customer lines in New York required repair. This means every Verizon customer will need an average of one repair every five years;
• Verizon’s complaint rate with the PSC has exceeded the PSC’s own limit for good service every month since June 2010. Most recently, Verizon exceeded the limit by more than double the threshold;
• Verizon’s agreement with the Commission establishes two classes of customers: “core” customers (8%) that qualify for enhanced repair service because they are elderly and/or have medical problems and non-core customers (virtually everyone else). The Commission only enforces service standards and repair lapses with “core” customers, which are required to have out of service lines restored within 24 hours 80% of the time. Verizon is free to delay other repairs indefinitely without consequence.
• The PSC has already fined Verizon $400,000 earlier this year for poor service from October-December 2011.

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WWNY talks with Massena town supervisor Joseph Gray, who has launched a campaign to force Verizon to develop a plan to better handle outages in northern New York. (2 minutes)

Some 30,000 Shaw customers, mostly in Calgary, spent much of yesterday without phone service, and many more western Canadians experienced Internet problems as a result of a small electrical fire at a Shaw Communications facility in downtown Calgary.

Described by a news report as “chaos,” the fire also brought down at least three Calgary radio stations, an area bank’s ATM network, hospital communications, government offices, and Calgary’s 311 government information service.

A transformer fire on the 13th floor at Shaw’s Calgary headquarters, combined with the sprinkler system that put the fire out, proved the old adage that water and electricity don’t mix. Calgary’s power company disconnected electrical service to the building, creating additional outages for corporate customers who use Shaw’s data center, also inside the building.

As a result of the fire and its impact, Calgary officials decided to activate the city’s municipal emergency plan.

Shaw’s Internet service problems were felt as far away as Vancouver, according to news reports. As of late this afternoon, Shaw’s website is still offline.

While phone service has largely been restored, everything is not back to normal at Shaw’s headquarters, where many workers were turned away as late as this afternoon. Several streets around the building remained closed as of this morning.

Calgary Emergency Management Agency director Bruce Burrell called the incident “a major telecommunications failure,” and noted it was felt across the province and beyond.

Shaw joined local and provincial officials to assess the incident and the fire department response, as well as reviewing its impact.

It has been a difficult week for Calgary and Alberta generally. On Monday, just as the Calgary Stampede Rodeo fired into high gear, Alberta’s electricity companies began rolling blackouts after six power generators went down.

Questions are being raised about the impact of both events.

[flv width=”616″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/CTV Shaw Service Disrupted 7-12-12.flv[/flv]

CTV Calgary covers the impact of the fire at Shaw Communications’ headquarters in Calgary, Alb. and the cleanup still ongoing.  (6 minutes)