Q: Of course, the numbers change hourly, but how would you summarize our restoration effort?
A: We’re seeing about a 50% drop in customer outages every day, thanks to the tremendous efforts of our technicians out in the field, so I’d say we’re clearly making progress. We’re following closely behind the electric utilities as they restore commercial service, so the big outages are being addressed just as quickly as they make their repairs. It’s the individual down drops to customers’ homes that I’m focused on now: rolling trucks and making those repairs, which are time-consuming.
Q: I understand that we have Comcasters and business partners from other regions coming in to assist.
A: Locally, we’ve redeployed some of our techs from the Eugene, Corvallis, and Longview areas which didn’t experience the storm the way the Portland region and Salem area did. We’ve also brought in a team of 20 – maybe more – from California to lend a hand. And our business partner, Spectra, has sent 25 technicians from neighboring states. All of these additional resources are helping our restoration efforts and enabling us to see big improvements in our outage numbers.
Q: We know that there are many customers who have their power restored, but still no internet. Can you explain that?
A: There are three basic scenarios that create a Comcast service outage:
- Commercial power, which is needed to power the network, can be off even if your power at home is on.
- Commercial power can be on at a particular location, but a portion of the network that serves that location is in an area where commercial power is unavailable or repairs are needed to the distribution lines that service neighborhoods and businesses.
- Individual service drop lines to the customer’s home have been impacted. These are usually, but not always, caused by a tree limb pulling down the cable.
Q: What should customers who have power but no internet do? How do they make sure that Comcast is aware of their individual outage?
A: Check your My Account App to see if there is an outage. If an outage is reported, there is no need to call. If no outage is showing, folks need to let us know so we can alert our technicians. The culprit is most likely a down drop to their home, and we need to know about each of those and roll a truck for repair.
