Hurricane Sandy’s destructive forces of wind and water, combined with extensive electrical outages has wreaked havoc with telecommunications services from Maine to Virginia, leaving some customers potentially without service for weeks.

The storm has flooded Verizon‘s central switching offices in New York City, did extensive damage to Sprint’s wireless network and infrastructure, has left large sections of upstate and downstate New York without cable service, and clocks ticking for wireless cell customers using cell sites currently running on battery backup power.

Some of the worst problems are affecting Verizon’s landline and FiOS networks after the company lost two critical switching centers in Manhattan to extensive flooding. That has contributed to significant problems for Verizon customers across Manhattan, Queens, and Long Island. Further afield, Verizon customers without service can blame power outages and fallen trees that took out overhead wiring. Together, Verizon customers are experiencing significant problems with landline, broadband, and FiOS TV and Internet services in some areas.

Many Verizon Wireless cell sites are operating on battery backup units which maintain service for only a limited time. New York, New Jersey and Connecticut customers report increasing difficulty maintaining cell service signals as those battery backup units start to fail. Verizon engineering crews can restore undamaged cell sites with backup generators once permitted into storm-ravaged areas.

One of the hardest hit wireless carriers

Cablevision‘s business largely depends on areas that took a direct hit from Hurricane Sandy. Cablevision repair crews are encountering extensive power outages and damaged overhead wiring brought down during the storm in Connecticut and Long Island. Its service area closer to New York City has been primarily affected by power outages. Comcast said it was still starting an assessment process and was not prepared to report on the current state of its network, which operates in cities north and south of the New York City metro area.

While Time Warner Cable spokesman Alex Dudley reports little damage to Time Warner Cable’s systems, many remain offline from power interruptions, and Time Warner’s Twitter feed for upstate New York reports isolated outages in Portland, Maine and across upstate New York, primarily due to power losses or damage to infrastructure.

Sprint appears to be the hardest hit wireless carrier with widespread service outages, interruptions and call completion issues throughout the states of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Maryland, North Virginia and New England. Some customers far away from the worst-hit areas report trouble making and receiving calls on Sprint’s network. Many cell sites are also damaged.

AT&T is assessing damage to its landline operations in Connecticut, where it is the dominant phone company. Many AT&T cell phone sites, like Verizon, are operating on battery backup in power outage areas until AT&T can bring generators online to maintain service.

T-Mobile and MetroPCS report damage and service outages to their cellular networks as well, mostly from power outages.

Lyndhurst, NJ

Even old style communications networks were not spared from Hurricane Sandy. The Northeast Radio Watch reports a large number of broadcasters across the region off the air as of this morning:

• Outside of WOR (710), most New York City area AM stations are off the air. WOR survived the storm with its recently built three tower site located just above the flood waters. Chief engineer Tom Ray told NERW the water is 10 feet deep at WOR’s transmitter site in the Meadowlands. Many AM stations in New York favor transmitter locations in now-ravaged Lyndhurst and the Meadowlands. The result: indefinite absence of all-news WINS (1010) (it’s now back up — thanks to an update from Scott Fybush), which is now being heard on WXRK (92.3). Also missing: WLIB (1190), WSNR (620), WMCA (570), WNYC (820), WPAT (930), WNYM (970), WADO (1280) and WWRV (1330). FM outlets favor much higher transmitter locations, usually atop large skyscrapers, that escaped flood damage.
• WABC continues to air the audio portion of its broadcast on WEPN-AM (1050) and FM (98.7) for the benefit of those without power. WCBS studios are currently powered “by candlelight.”
• The Jersey shore’s FM outlets are mostly silent. Atlantic City was among the hardest hit, and some stations may be off the air for some time while rebuilding.
• Connecticut stations are also off the air. Powerhouse WICC (600) in Bridgeport has transmitters on Long Island Sound — a poor choice to withstand Sandy. It is likely underwater. Also gone: WGCH (1490 Greenwich), WAXB (850 Ridgefield) and WSHU (1260 Westport) and WALK-FM (97.5 Patchogue).

Repair crews for all concerned will likely only start assessing damage later today, but many will have to wait for power crews to complete work — they have first priority. Those lucky enough to see service restoration once power returns will be in far better shape than others who could wait weeks to get their Internet, television and phone service back.

Correction: Original story included reference to studio power knocked out at WOR-TV. That should have said WOR-AM (radio). 

Telling Time Warner customers to get rid of the cable company’s phone service.

Best Buy employees in upstate New York are advising Time Warner Cable customers to dump Time Warner phone service and buy their own cable modem to completely avoid any additional monthly fees.

“We don’t have modems that will support Time Warner’s voice services, so basically any customer that has that bundle either has to make the decision to get rid of that service or deal with paying for that service every month,” said Syracuse Best Buy employee Drew Cacciola.

Cacciola told a Syracuse television station Time Warner’s supplied equipment is “old and refurbished” and that if customers purchase their own equipment, they will have the latest technology and won’t have to worry about ending up with another refurbished cable modem if the current modem fails.

“If [a new modem] breaks down you can get a new one you don’t have to send it back to them and you won’t get another refurbished one – you get a new one,” said Cacciola.

In fact, Time Warner phone customers do not have to cancel their phone service to avoid the modem fee, but they will be stuck with two pieces of equipment — a Time Warner-supplied eMTA that manages the phone service (with its Internet ports disabled) and the customer’s own purchased cable modem. For now, Time Warner is not charging customers for eMTA equipment used exclusively for its phone service.

Best Buy does not carry some of the models on Time Warner’s approved modem list, and the cheapest one WSYR reporters could find cost around $60, meaning it will take just over a year to recoup the cost of the modem.

Motorola cable modem

Time Warner Cable’s modem fee continues to create consternation for customers, especially when they learn the same piece of equipment used for both Internet and phone service costs $3.95 a month when used for broadband, but is free when used only for phone service.

Stop the Cap! reader Ben argued with a Time Warner representative trying to understand the reasoning.

“So, let me get this straight about the modem fee: If I have phone there is no fee but if I use the same modem to also get Internet, there is a fee?,” Ben asked.

Yes, came the answer. The explanation:

“About the modem fee: Our costs for Internet equipment keep increasing and unfortunately we could not continue to absorb the costs related to their purchase, maintenance and repair,” wrote a Time Warner employee named ‘Paul-E.’ “Leasing a modem ensures you have the most up to date and capable equipment to take advantage of our services as we offer faster speeds and additional functionality. These events sometimes require that we replace your current equipment to give you the best experience.”

Time Warner’s explanation for the new modem fee sounds plausible, but unfortunately for “Paul-E” (and the company),  much of it is demonstrably false.

Investors Business Daily reports the new $3.95 computer modem leasing fee could raise up to $500 million a year for the cable company.

“I would look at this as a price increase,” Bryan Kraft, an analyst at Evercore Partners, told IBD via email. “There are some questions that need to be answered before the impact on ARPU (average monthly revenue per user) can be reasonably estimated.”

Stop the Cap! took a look at Time Warner Cable’s financial reports and discovered the company’s capital expenses for its high speed Internet service (and cable modem equipment) have dropped for the third year in a row:

Time Warner Cable’s capital expenditures on customer premise equipment, including cable modems, has dropped for three years in a row.

Capital spending (as a whole) so far this year has decreased as a percentage of revenue to just 12% for residential customers. Time Warner has spent money primarily on extending service to potential business customers.

The need to charge you more for a cable modem is questionable when residential Internet service rate increases and customers gravitating to more expensive, higher speed services already deliver the company higher average revenue per customer without spiking their costs.

When the station relayed complaints about long hold times and busy signals for customers trying to activate their purchased cable modem, the response from Time Warner — don’t call on Monday or Friday or around morning or dinner time unless you are prepared to wait on hold.

[flv width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WSYR Syracuse Time Warner Cable modem charge 10-24-12.mp4[/flv]

WSYR in Syracuse covers the ongoing controversy with Time Warner Cable’s new modem fees, and a Best Buy employee tells Time Warner customers to get rid of the company’s phone service.  (3 minutes)

All Time Warner Cable broadband customers in upstate New York, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Carolinas will begin paying $3.95 a month to rent the cable modem required to make your $54.99/month Time Warner Cable Internet service work.

The cable company confirmed the charge will apply to all customers in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, Binghamton, and beyond effective Nov. 1, joining New York City already paying the modem rental fee as of this week. The fee is gradually being introduced in all Time Warner Cable service areas nationwide.

Signature Home customers and those participating in the company’s trial of discounted Internet for the disadvantaged are exempted.

The new fee represents a 7% rate increase for Internet service, unless customers pay for their own modem.

Time Warner Cable mailed notification postcards to all affected areas this week, so they should begin arriving in mailboxes as soon as today. Southern states including Texas may see the new modem fee in their area as early as December.

“It is strictly a fee for customers who choose to lease their Internet modem from us,” Joli Plucknette-Farmen, the communications manager for Time Warner Cable’s western New York division told the Buffalo News. “As we continue to deploy more and more cable modems, many of these modems need servicing or replacing, get damaged and some are not returned. The monthly lease charge will allow us to service or replace the equipment, provide a better user experience and further enhance our Internet services.”

Stop the Cap! notes Time Warner Cable already assesses a fee ranging from $24-150 for unreturned or damaged cable modem equipment, however.

Phone subscribers who do not have Internet service will escape the fee as long as they avoid signing up for broadband.

Many of the models on the company’s approved modem list are now out of stock at the handful of retailers selling them. Other sellers, particularly on eBay and Amazon Marketplace, have doubled prices to as much as $200 on some popular DOCSIS 3 modems to capitalize on the cable operator’s new fees.

Time Warner Cable is alerting customers in upstate New York they are next in line for a gradual transition away from analog cable television service.

But unlike the near-complete switch to digital affecting many customers in Maine, the cable operator plans a less jarring shift in New York, beginning with switching 4-7 channels to digital format between Oct. 10-17.

Time Warner will also introduce New York customers to the company’s digital transport adapter (DTA). The digital adapter was designed for televisions currently direct connected to cable without a set top box. Time Warner’s DTA will convert digital signals to standard definition analog, so customers can get back the channels they lost in the digital switch without the monthly expense of a traditional set top box.

Time Warner plans to offer its New York customers free DTA equipment until the end of November, 2013 — after which the boxes will cost 99 cents a month. (Time Warner’s DTA website claims the boxes will be available without cost until the end of 2014.)

Customers using DTA equipment will not be able to use them to watch premium channels, but will get back any basic channels that were previously converted to digital-only format and those channels switched in the future.

The channels being dropped from analog service vary in each upstate city. Time Warner is notifying customers by mail about the specific channels that will be dropped in each area, but here is a rough breakdown:

Rochester: CMT, C-SPAN, EWTN, Golf Channel, Lifetime Movie Network*

Buffalo: C-SPAN, EWTN, CFTO (CTV), E!*, CNN International*, OWN*, WXPJ (Ion)*,  Discovery Fit and Health*

Syracuse: CMT, C-SPAN, EWTN, Golf Channel, Lifetime Movie Network, OWN, truTV

(*)-Not in all areas.

Time Warner Cable previously announced it was committed to discontinuing analog cable television service across its national footprint within the next four years.

In a separate announcement, all Time Warner Cable customers will see the addition of more Fox programming thanks to a recent contract renewal agreement.  Fox Business Network, and its HD companion channel, will now be a part of Time Warner’s Standard tier (although the channels will continue to be in the digital format). Fox Movie Channel, previously part of the mini-pay Movie Pass tier will be moved to the Digital Basic Tier. These changes are scheduled to occur Oct. 31.

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.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WWNY Watertown Gray Phone Disruptions Perilous Flaw 8-7-12.mp4[/flv]

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)