 marigoldsGainfully employed, finallyPremium,MVM
join:2002-05-13
Saint Louis, MO
kudos:1 | reply to fiberguy
Re: Hope Virgin Media isn't blowing smoke I've worked as a commissioner overseeing a cable franchise (one that was considered one of the better regulated franchises in the area). This was about 5 years ago now.
I can absolutely back up what fiberguy is saying here (and I don't normally agree with him). Emergency disconnects are fine (and this would qualify, the window was defined on when the thief would be on), and credits are not required unless the outage exceeds a certain amount of time (normally 4 hours, bare minimum would be an hour, and this still would not qualify). And that is still based on the customer calling about an outage. Automatic credits are rare and generally require a much longer outage period (like 24 hours).
If I were sitting on a commission and informed of this operation, my only suggestion back to the franchisee would be to inform the entire franchise of the possibility of intermittent outages over the weekend not lasting more than 30 minutes for maintenance purposes. Considering the purpose, I would agree with a plan like this. Cable thieves caused way more service interruption than a fairly ingenious plan like this would.
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