After Coming Under Fire, Charter to Credit Accounts: Cable Outage

By Anna Tong, The Tribune, San Luis Obispo, Calif.

Jun. 19–High-speed Internet and cable TV provider Charter Communications plans to relocate some of its fiber-optic cables and credit customers who lost service after a fire Friday, a company spokesman said.

The Friday afternoon fire near the top of Cuesta Grade burned through cables that provided TV and Internet access to customers in the North County.

Later that afternoon, a cable providing analog cable service (channels 2 through 98) to the southern part of San Luis Obispo County shattered because of overheating. Customers in the southern part of the county, though, retained digital cable and Internet access, spokesman Craig Watson said.

At its height, Watson said, the outage affected 65,000 customers throughout the county.

Repair work, which included replacing a fiber-optic cable crossing Highway 101, began late Friday night and was finished by early Saturday morning.

“By 5 a.m. on Saturday, everybody in the county should have been back on,” Watson said.

Charter will grant customers credit for the length of the outage.

“Customers just have to call us, and we’ll take care of it,” he said.

Charter will also relocate its analog cable TV cables from the west side of Cuesta Grade to within San Luis Obispo’s city limits by the end of July, Watson said.

“They will be much less vulnerable to fire damage,” he added.

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