Published 2:15 am PST Thursday, November 10, 2005

Hundreds of SBC Communications' DSL customers in North Highlands, Citrus Heights and Carmichael lost their Internet connections Friday and weren't returned to full service until Wednesday, the company said.

SBC spokeswoman Vanessa Smith said an equipment malfunction in SBC's central office in North Highlands caused the outage to an undetermined number of customers. The equipment was replaced over the weekend, but Monday the company was still receiving complaints. She said most of the outages were intermittent, and some customers had connections, though at much slower than normal DSL speed.

Continues @ SacBee