NPI's Cascadia Advocate

Offering commentary and analysis from Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's uplifting perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Wednesday, September 24th, 2014

Frontier working round the clock to restore service to Redmond area after major outage

For the past few days, many homes and busi­ness­es in the greater Red­mond area have been with­out phone, Inter­net, and tele­vi­sion ser­vice after a con­struc­tion crew work­ing on a stormwa­ter treat­ment project sliced through fiber and cop­per lines belong­ing to Fron­tier Com­mu­ni­ca­tions when they dug in the wrong place. The dam­age caused was appraised by Fron­tier tech­ni­cians to be very bad, and ever since Sat­ur­day morn­ing, they’ve been work­ing round the clock on a fix.

Ser­vice in many parts of Red­mond and beyond have been restored, but there are still places where the out­age con­tin­ues, includ­ing the Think­space cowork­ing com­mu­ni­ty in down­town Red­mond, which NPI belongs to.

Fron­tier, at the urg­ing of NPI and oth­er cus­tomers, has set up a por­tal to pro­vide infor­ma­tion about the out­age and the sta­tus of repairs. Addi­tion­al­ly, Fron­tier is host­ing a com­mu­ni­ty meet­ing to share infor­ma­tion with its customers:

Fron­tier Ser­vices were impact­ed in Red­mond, WA begin­ning Sat­ur­day, 9⁄20 when an out­side con­struc­tion crew cut through fiber and cop­per cables at 15802 Bear Creek Park­way, at the cor­ner of Bear Creek Park­way and Red­mond Way.  Fron­tier crews were onsite through­out the week­end [and] are work­ing around the clock to restore services.

Full 911 voice ser­vices were restored by Sun­day morn­ing, and all FiOS ser­vices were restored 9⁄24.

Fron­tier will be host­ing a com­mu­ni­ty meet­ing today at 6:30 PM in the Audi­to­ri­um of the Red­mond Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­ter locat­ed at 16600 NE 80th Street Red­mond, WA. There is an infor­mal Q&A from 3:30 to 6:30 PM, with the for­mal pre­sen­ta­tion start­ing at 6:30 PM.

Fron­tier announced a short time ago that it has restored FiOS ser­vice to all affect­ed cus­tomers. FiOS is Fron­tier’s pre­mier fiber to the premis­es (FTTP) offer­ing, inher­it­ed from Ver­i­zon, which offers much faster speeds than DSL.

Crews work to repair damage to Frontier's lines in Redmond

Crews have been work­ing around the clock to repair dam­age to Fron­tier’s net­work in down­town Red­mond. Red­mond Way was ripped open the night of Sep­tem­ber 20th to speed the effort along. (Pho­to: Andrew Villeneuve/NPI)

The repairs nec­es­sary to bring Fron­tier’s net­work back online have affect­ed the city’s stormwa­ter treat­ment project. The city announced yes­ter­day that the work pre­vi­ous­ly sched­uled to take place this week­end had been can­celed:

As the City of Red­mond con­tin­ues to work with Fron­tier to restore ser­vice, the clo­sure of Red­mond Way pre­vi­ous­ly sched­uled for this week­end, Sep. 26–29 will not take place until a lat­er date, but sig­nif­i­cant week­day impacts through Sep. 29 will continue.

Con­struc­tion of the Red­mond Way Stormwa­ter Treat­ment Facil­i­ty project is under­way with pipe instal­la­tion and pave­ment repair. Vis­it www.redmond.gov and reg­is­ter to receive traf­fic alerts.

Detour sig­nage is in place direct­ing motorist to alter­nate routes. Access to local busi­ness­es and res­i­dents will be maintained.

Con­struc­tion is weath­er depen­dent and clo­sures or evening work may extend beyond cur­rent clo­sure notices. Pub­lic noti­fi­ca­tions will be updat­ed if changes occur.

Accord­ing to Fron­tier, the pro­longed down­time stemmed from the nature of the dam­age to its lines. From what we’ve heard, the fiber and cop­per cables weren’t just cut, they were pulled and ripped up, caus­ing dam­age to the lines in oth­er places. No won­der the repair job is tak­ing a long time.

We’d still like to see Fron­tier reach out to its affect­ed cus­tomers by email, which they haven’t done. Post­ing noti­fi­ca­tions on Twit­ter and redmond.gov isn’t enough. Fron­tier needs to be more proac­tive in man­ag­ing this cri­sis, even though they did­n’t cause it. The City, mean­while, needs to under­take a full inves­ti­ga­tion to find out how this hap­pened and how we can pre­vent it from occur­ring again.

Written by Andrew Villeneuve :: 5:19 PM

Categories: Policy Topics, Public Planning

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One Comment

  1. We still have no inter­net. I don’t know how Fron­tier made the con­clu­sion that FIOS has been restored for all affect­ed customers.

    # by Ping :: September 24th, 2014 at 11:08 PM

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