by Alex Brooks
Representatives from Charter Communications came to a Special Meeting of the Petersburgh Town Board to talk with the Town Board and its cable TV customers in Petersburgh about service problems being experienced here and also about renewing Charter’s cable franchise.
Residents in Petersburgh and Berlin have experienced persistent problems with the cable signal. The signal will sometimes come and go or become weak and full of static or have another channel appear on top of the one being watched.
These problems have been happening in some cases on a daily basis, and customers have found that Charter’s response has been frustrating and ineffective. Usually they say a technician has to visit the customer’s house and want to make an appointment for the service call, which might be a week or two off.
About a dozen Charter customers attended the Special Board meeting, and told the two Charter representatives about all of the problems they are having. Some said they can’t stay home from work to meet with the service technician; some said having the technician come to their house was pointless because the problem is obviously somewhere earlier in the distribution system since everyone here is having the same problems; all said dealing with Charter’s phone system and trouble reporting protocols has been extremely frustrating.
Tom Cohan, the Director of Governmental Relations for Charter Communications, said his company had engaged call centers in Mexico and the Philippines to answer calls for them because before they did so, when there was an outage, everyone would be calling at once and very few were able to get through. Now at least someone will answer the phone, and they will have all the information about your account on their screen, even if it is not a local person.
Dan McCumber said he spoke to “a very nice lady in Nova Scotia, Canada,” so apparently the call centers are not only in Mexico and the Philippines.
Cohan said the company does not normally treat a call as a systemic problem unless they get three calls from people on the same street, but because of the persistent problems in Petersburgh, he said he will classify all calls from Petersburgh as a problem with the distribution system until the service is fixed on a town-wide basis.
Bill Rooney, Charter’s technician for fixing problems up on the poles, spoke next. He said there has been a very persistent problem through most of the summer, and he has been out here climbing poles three times a day trying to fix it. He said, “It is a long run – there’s a lot of wire and a lot of connections to check. He said he appreciates that this has been frustrating to the customers, and he said it has been frustrating to him as well. He said he thinks he found the main source of the problem about two weeks ago, when he found a “node” with water in it and fixed that problem, and he has not had any calls from Petersburgh since that time. Customers in the room did not seem to be convinced that the problem was fixed.
Rooney also said that Charter is planning to go over the whole system in this area over the next four weeks to “rebalance the whole system: and “sweep it.” He said residents will probably see a lot of cable trucks in the area soon, and he is hopeful that the problem will be over when they’re finished. He also gave his cell phone number to all of the customers present so they can call him directly when there’s a problem and bypass the company’s trouble reporting system.
New Cable Franchise
Mr. Cohan then asked the Town Board to consider signing a new cable franchise. Supervisor Mason Hubbard said they would consider it but they need to show it to the Town Attorney and hold a public hearing on it before the Board can act. There are 94 Charter Communications subscribers in Petersburgh.