Cable apologizes for outage

By By Adam Land

Thursday, February 24, 2005

Sunflower Broadband has aired several commercials a day apologizing to customers for a service outage on Feb. 7.

In addition to the commercials, the cable company is issuing coupons for free On-Demand pay-per-view programming to compensate the nearly 3,000 customers who lost extended cable services. However, only a portion of customers will be able to redeem the compensation.

Only customers with Sunflower’s new Moxi digital cable box are eligible for the specific pay-per-view programming that the coupons were issued.

And for Scott Palmberg, who has an older model cable box, apologies just aren’t enough. The Topeka senior wants his money back for the nearly three days his extended cable was out.

“It irritated me because we pay about $80 a month for cable,” said Palmberg. “That means I lost around 10 bucks, non refunded.”

The company does not plan on refunding money to customers who experienced the outage, said Emily Mulligan, marketing manager for Sunflower Broadband.

“It is really hard for us to tell who had a full outage and who just had a partial outage,” Mulligan said. “We are offering three coupons for free On-Demand trials for customers who experienced the outage.”

Flipping between channels, Palmberg realized something was wrong with his premium channels. He was checking the movie channels when he realized none of them worked.

“I didn’t know what happened,” Palmberg said. “It started out with just a few channels, then everything but basic cable failed.”

A transparent upgrade caused the problems, Mulligan said.

Transparent upgrades are systematic upgrades that are not supposed to affect services. The upgrade began sometime during the night of Feb. 7 and continued into the morning of Feb. 8.

“This was a major upgrade, which we thought would not affect service,” Mulligan said. “But we did have some technical difficulties.”

Upgrades were made to offer customers more services and different menu options, Mulligan said.

One of the additional features added in the upgrades was the On-Demand pay-per-view service, which Sunflower issued as compensation.

Sunflower Broadband does not have upgrades scheduled in the near future, Mulligan said.

For now, Palmberg will continue his service with Sunflower Broadband.

“I really like digital cable,” Palmberg said. “I will stay with Sunflower and just hope this doesn’t happen again.”

Edited by Lori Bettes

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