Optimum: Outage ‘power related’
Cable, internet customers demand refunds
Optimum cable and broadband customers whose service went out for hours Friday night remain in the dark whether the company will credit their bills for the prolonged outage.
Through its Optimum service, Altice USA is the primary cable TV provider for coastal Fairfield County and towns just inland from Greenwich to Milford and extending up the Naugatuck River Valley, as well as parts of Litchfield County and central Connecticut.
The New York Citybased company is the fourthlargest cable TV operator in the country after Comcast, Stamford’s Charter Communications and Cox Communications, earning $61 million in the first six months of this year after incurring a $227 million loss in the same period in 2018.
Optimum cable TV and Internet service crashed Friday night for customers across the carrier’s Connecticut and New Yorkarea operations, unleashing irate complaints on social media and online chat boards.
“No cable in CT, hardly any internet,” Rebecca
Isenstein wrote on Twitter. “So I called the customer support phone number provided on my monthly bill — it actually says that it’s not in service! The number provided BY optimum is not in service!!”
Others on Twitter also sounded off about the company’s customer service line being down at the height of the outage, which affected as many as 15,000 customers in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey and caused local police departments to issue warnings to not call 911 about the problem.
“Since you shut off your Customer Service line, we all deserve a hefty credit to our accounts. ‘We’re always here to answer your questions.’ NO clearly you’re not, otherwise we’d be able to call you when there’s a sudden outage across multiple cities & no one knows why,” Nathalie Levey wrote on Twitter.
The outage hit just two weeks after Altice USA tacked $5 onto the rate for Connecticut customers who subscribe to its “Premier” TV package, raising the monthly charge to $110 on par with the rate for a “Gold” plan the company discontinued while transitioning those subscribers to “Premier” status.
An Altice USA spokesperson described the outage as “power related” and that the company is investigating, without providing further insight Monday in response to a Hearst Connecticut Media query, including whether Altice USA would credit customer accounts for any inconvenience caused by the loss of service.
Subscribers who attempted to get answers through the company’s call centers were left on hold for hours. On the Downdetector.com website that was among the first to report the outage on Friday, multiple people stated that calls placed from their Optimum telephone service were fed an automated message to call again later, but calls they placed from mobile phones or other non-Optimum lines were patched through to agents.
Customers lit into Altice USA on the company’s Optimum Facebook page on Monday, faulting Altice USA for not doing enough to keep customers updated on service restoration and calling bill credits of less than $7 not enough for the disruption of service.
After spending $17.7 billion in 2016 to acquire Optimum and parent company Cablevision, Altice promptly shuttered call center operations in Shelton and Stratford that had employed about 600 people.
The company maintains a general website where customers can request bill credits as noted by Hal Levy, chairman of a regional cable TV advisory council that keeps tabs on carriers and the quality of services they provide. The website on Monday directed customers to telephone, online chat and Twitter for followup on requests for bill credits.
“In past instances of widespread outages when the company was owned by Cablevison, automatic bill credits were issued to subscribers,” Levy wrote in an email to Hearst Connecticut Media.
Optimum has generated few formal complaints over the past several years, with the Connecticut Public Utilities Regulatory Authority logging only 15 last year related to outages, and about double that number related to quality of service.
PURA has oversight of cable TV operators like Altice USA, but does not subject them to the same enforcement treatment as historic utilities like Frontier Communications, Eversource Energy and Avangrid.
It marked a sour ending to an otherwise big week for Altice USA, which on Thursday launched mobile service featuring “price for life” rates of $20 a month for cable and broadband subscribers and $30 a month for all others, with plans featuring unlimited call, text and streaming.
An Altice Mobile website detailing plan enrollment options continued to bog down on Monday morning, with the page failing to load and a banner message acknowledging “minor delays,” asking customers to try again later.