Fibrant working to restore phone service
Published 12:00 am Monday, October 31, 2011
SALISBURY — Fibrant’s Internet and cable TV services were down for about two hours this morning.
Phone service is still out for some customers and should be restored by noon.
About 1,200 customers were affected, said Jim Behmer, interim director for the city’s new fiber-optic utility. Internet and TV services were restored by 9 a.m., and Fibrant staffers are manually resetting phone service for about 850 telephone customers one customer at a time.
All three services went down at 7 a.m. due to a problem with one of Fibrant’s suppliers, Behmer said.
“It was beyond our control,” he said.
Behmer said he suspects the problem was with the supplier who provides the equipment that allows the network’s brain center, called the headend, to communicate with technology installed at each home. He said he is waiting for confirmation and their plan to prevent the problem in the future.
“What I’m trying to get from them now is how this is not going to happen again,” he said.
Behmer said outages are unusual for Fibrant, which launched in November 2010.
“We apologize to our customers,” he said. “We don’t want to have outages and will continue to improve and work with vendors to fund solutions to prevent future outages.”
Read more in Tuesday’s Post.
Contact reporter Emily Ford at 704-797-4264.