Internet, TV outages frustrate S. Florida

Long after their power has been restored, many South Florida Internet and television subscribers are still hot — but not because they don’t have air conditioning.

Thousands of customers of the region’s two major Internet and television providers remained without services on Monday and are receiving no specific information about when they will be restored.

According to the Federal Communications Commission’s latest post-Hurricane Irma status update released Monday, at least 893,409 Florida communications services subscribers had not yet been restored. That was down from 1.1 million on Sunday. The report does not break down outages by provider.

Comcast said Monday it has restored services to 80 percent of its customers in the tricounty region, including 78,000 over the past 24 hours.

But based on emails and phone calls to the Sun Sentinel, as well as social media posts, customers of AT&T’s U-verse services are frustrated as they continue to experience outages but can’t get answers as to why the outages persist and what the company is doing to make repairs.

Debra Boudreau of Fort Lauderdale said an AT&T technician who came to her home Sunday told her the company has a widespread problem with circuit boards installed in distribution boxes at the ends of residential streets that serve about 200 households each.

A large number of the boards failed across the region affected by Irma and AT&T doesn’t have enough replacements or qualified technicians to install them, Boudreau said the technician told her.

Messages posted in the customer forum section of AT&T’s website included various versions of that explanation.

In a post addressed to “Florida U-verse customers,” one customer said the outage was not caused solely by the hurricane. “This is a software/hardware problem,” the user said. “When the … neighborhood boxes went down for lack of power, they did not come back up correctly.”

In a statement to the Sun Sentinel on Monday, AT&T did not respond to questions about the equipment failures cited in the customers’ comments, how many South Florida customers remained without services, when those services are expected to be restored, or how the company planned to compensate customers.

Spokeswoman Kelly Starling said, “It is not equipment or staffing that is our greatest challenge. It is the ongoing lack of commercial power.” When told some of the customers with outages have electricity in their homes, Starling added, “Just because your power is on does not mean the U-verse box at the end of the street is still on.”

Starling also said, “We have made significant progress in restoring wireline services for customers in Florida, with more than 80 percent of affected network equip-