Rants, Raves, and Praise → SLOW to get Insight services back up after ice storm

We had a severe ice storm in Louisville, as did other areas and states. Over 200,000 without electricity and an estimate of up to two weeks to get all restored. I was a lucky one who got power back within two days. I am grateful, very.

BUT, I would like to know WHY whenever we lose electrical power we also lose ALL Insight services, cable, broadband and telephone? Every time, all three go out when the power goes and they are always SLOWER to be restored. Even though I have had power back on this time for almost a full two days, Insight still has not gotten us back online. It usually takes them a few hours. I haven't seen a single Insight repair vehicle in my area.

Wake up Insight. If you want people to think you are indispensable and valuable then you have to expect they are going to want fast rebound time after outages.

Coming from an area subject to hurricanes - I think you have just answered your own questionElectrical companies work & repairs need to be completed before other utilities can even attempt to have access.
They need a green light, and more than likely have other areas that may have been harder hit.

I always get power back prior to other services being restored.

If there's an endangerment existing somewhere else - that's where they'll go first

Since you really aren't asking for technical assistance..I'm moving this post to Rants, Raves & Praises.

Yet another reason while I will keep my POTS (plain-old-telephone-service) as long as I possibly can.

You know what is really funny, I live out in Shelbyville. We had a generator so we had power throughout the entire thing and the cable did not go out at all, even with the power out broadband and everything worked great. I know that most of their node controllers, those green boxes that say alpha on them and have magnets that say owned by insight communications have natural gas generators in them so that keeps stuff online. That is what it looks like out here, I am not sure about Louisville though.

Having worked for a rather large utility (covering 4 states), I can tell you this is considered industry standard for power restoration..

1. Repairs that will bring service to the most amount of people - such as transmission and main feeder lines.

2. Repairs to bring service to priority services - hospitals, police, fire dept, communications, schools/shelters.

3. Repairs to bring service to customers with priority life support equipment.

4. Everybody else, using the same theory as #1. Repairs to bring the most amount of customers in the shortest time.

If you are unfortunate to live at the end of the line, or your outage is a blown fuse / downed wire that's effecting you and another house, expect to wait the longest time..

Wah Wah Wah. Happens all of the time these days. I remember when I was younger, that when the power went out, lost Telephone all because of a huge ice storm, we went to friends of my parents who had a Fire place, and treated like a camp out. Had more fun then, then hearing people now days complaining about no Internet, no CATV, etc.

All I can say, is suck it up Buckwheat.

Dear Greg, please do feel free to toss out your computer, phone and TV and have "more fun." No sense living in the modern era and being unhappy eh? Me.. I want the services I pay for and depend upon and until I see an Insight service truck actually out there on the road this weekend I do not believe that they are actually even attempting to restore services. I think they are just waiting for regular work week hours and warmer weather. I have noticed that whenever service goes down on a Friday or Saturday nothing happens until Monday or later.

I think that there are some cases that you just can't expect things to be up. Looking from both sides there are just some instances when things don't work. I work for an ISP and the ice storm knocked out most of our network for the greater part of three days. There wasn't much we could do about it either. Considering that we were a wisp and some of our repeater locations where out in the middle of nowhere and did not have power. As for our main towers all of those have backup systems that we are available to use so they were up, but most of our customers didn't have power anyway.

For the most part I don't believe that insight's network is used for anything that is prudent to the time such as fire, ems, police, ect.. Now granted people that have power do need cable to keep up on the current events, but in a situation like that you just can't expect cable to work which is why I keep a handy pair of rabbit ears around and purchased a tv with the digital tuner in it. You can expect the free to air broadcasts working because of a couple of things.

One towers are in one location and are easily worked on. You have to keep in mind that insight has hundreds of thousands of miles of cable plant where problems have to be traced down and fixed, which is very time consuming and I can only imagine the mess they have to clean up after the storm.

Two towers are generally shared with other things like fire, and ems and police radios. So most all of them have backup systems and serve as very important links to the world and for the coordination of the relief effort.

As for your rant about them waiting for regular work weather, I am sure that they are. There is no way that they could have done any work on the overhead lines with all of the ice on them and the roads being how they were. I also saw a couple of their boxes driving around too and most of them were covered with not only an inch or so of ice but most of them were buried under snow drifts. I am not sure what it was like for your area but driving around to go check on towers most of their overhead cables a splitters had multiple inches of ice on them, not to mention the kind of vehicles they drive. They have two wheel rear powered work vans which don't drive worth a crap in any weather. I had a very hard time driving around with a 4 wheel drive truck. I know that they have cheery picker style trucks with 4 wheel drive but even with that there still wasn't much work that they could do.

My experience was the exact opposite of yours. My electric was out for two or three days with the windstorm and two days with the recent ice storm.

Both times, the cable internet was working as soon as I had electricity.

I could, and it would not affect me. I have a cellphone, and if need be, can have Internet access. When we go to my in-laws, they only have OTA, and it is okay. My other inlaws you can barely get Cellular service at their house, due to reside in the North woods, nothing affects me there.

It is called selfishness. If you cannot survive without it, it is time to look deeper into yourself and realize that not having CATV, Internet, or phone is not going to hurt you (then again, there are those that would have symptoms of psychological distress).

I would bet that it is out of Insights control. When we had a wind storm in Ohio that took out 1 million customers - Time Warner had to use generators to get their nodes up and running and those were in limited supply. We had folks without power for up to 3 weeks and during that time they did not have cable, internet, or a PC running. Those that had POTS generally had phones - if they had a corded one around.

You need to get a little bit realistic on what is happening and stop assuming that Insight can be up and running as fast as general electricity. Insight is not in control of everything and who and what gets power back first.

As several others have pointed out cable is not an essential service. LG&E brought in line crews from five other states to help restore power and had over 2500 people working to restore power. Insight and the cable industry in general does not have this kind of resources to work with. Before they can even begin work the trees have to be cleared, poles replaced and electric service is restored. Next in line I'm sure is conventional telephone lines and after all this work is complete the cable crews can access the poles to begin their repair work. It's not going to happen very fast a matter how much people rant and rave.

could be worse.

could be ZOMBIES.

I kid, I kid...
no zombies this time.....yet.

Rainwater freezes hard and thick on tree limbs. Big tree falls over and takes out telecom and cable television for 15K people in the county nearby.
(and it always breaks in multiple locations too)
As long as there are wires strung up on poles, we'll live with this. Get used to it.

Think of this as a learning experience.

I know how to heat a room with a candle in a metal coffee can. (It aint much but it'll keep you at 50 degree temp, two people in a 10x15 room)
I also knew enough to have a kerosene heater available...it was $20 at that yard sale last summer.
Look for them.

And the best part, my laptop lets me watch HD TV
(THE NEW DIGITAL STUFF)
off of rabbit ears.
I just take it to work to charge it every day.

Trees are the real problem. Nine times out of ten, we lose power because a tree branch has fallen on the power lines and snapped them. Seldom does the weight of the ice ever snap a line.

Ironically, the people that whine about their precious trees being trimmed by the power company are the same people that whine when the power/phone/cable goes out?

If I were king, every gobdam tree within falling distance of a utility line would be cut down and the branches shoved up the owners a**! I'm serious!

And odds are those tree huggers don't actually own any trees. I guess the fools must think mother nature picks up all that kindling after a storm ... There's quite a bit of it in my front yard.

I doubt the truthiness of this one.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Our staff has been working 24/7 to repair damages, maintain generators, answer questions and restore service as soon as power is restored and conditions are safe. As I mentioned on my blog today, »www.michaelsinsight.com/ ··· 202.html our plant worked miraculously well under very extreme circumstances. Most customers had their cable, Internet and phone service the moment their power came back on.

Our extremely dedicated (and very tired) staff truly appreciates seeing the kind words of thanks and understanding from our customers who realize how difficult recovering from something like this is.

A good amount of cable MSO'S lines are ran overhead on poles just because it is cheaper to get pole permits from the electric company than to mess with going underground. The sheer size of the ice storm and amount of trees fallen which in turn took down tons of lines, snapped poles, ect, is pretty crazy. There are still people in SE Missouri without power, and ameren has something like 4k plus people working on it. If insight had lines on any poles that where snapped, they have to wait for the power company to put new poles up before they can even think of getting new lines ran.

You cant really compare this storm to previous outages, and it sounds like insight is doing their best to safely return service to people as quickly as possible.

In one KY town - 300 poles were snapped - going to take awhile to get them back up...

I think what Greg_z was trying to say is that you can live without your NETZ, TV, and phone for a few days. The only thing that you really need in this day and age is a phone. Do you not own a cell phone?

It is? What is your definition of "need"?

I am also in Louisville, KY. Insight covers alot of the North Central part of KY. You have to think they dont have massive crews like LG&E and are not able to call in back up like LG&E. Cable is a luxury. Be glad you got power back and are not freezing. I know its a pain to be without internet but I would rather have power first, than nothing at all.

That is the silliest thing I've read in a long time, like a child stamping his feet because Insight is purposely withholding *your* services.

I would imagine there are other things in line that are much more important and need tending to long before they get to "the services you pay for".

As in an emergency.

Not entirely true. Utility placement guidelines are "Zoned" just like property use. There are zoning rules for underground as well as aerial. Under the zoning rules, you can't place UG cables in an aerial zoned easement.

Thats why we should burry the lines, for storms like this, then all u have to worry about is it getting dug up, which prollyt wouldent happen this time of the year.

then mike, why dont u guys go and burry ur lines, to prevent these issues

A lot higher cost in a relatively poor state.

yes but they wouldent be blowing the cash they are now to work overtime fixing all this, u gotta think long term savings vs short term cost.

You do understand that if the power poles were taken down then the facilities would also likely have no power. They would also have to convince the power company to bury their lines as well.

And they would have to jack up their prices to cover the cost and in a relatively poor state - that could very well cause people to not use the service.

You can't just look at one side of it and say it is a no brainer.