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Time-Warner Incompetence

Not so much in their defense, so let's call this a rebuttal:
I worked for TWC many years ago in the New England area and one year just before the start of a Super Bowl(Uh...can I say "Super Bowl" without getting a lawsuit wrapped around me? Oh, well...) the cable to one big area in New Hampshire went dead. Really dead. The whole thing. Lights out time. Flatline. Nuthin' at all.
Calls a plenty started coming in from mad-as-hell folks.

What happened?

Some yahoo shot a hole in the main distribution line from the headend. Techs finally found it and the manager had the shot-out hunk of cable on his desk for years after just to show people what we had to sometimes deal with.
 
My TWC in North Hollywood routinely does what was described in the story linked to above. It affects one or several but not all channels at one time. I believe that is is due to the digital streaming getting behind the local buffer and the picture then deteriorates and goes to black if it is off longer than a few seconds. When it comes back sooner the program kind of picks up where it left off. If it takes a long time then it comes back at a different point. Not the same as people shooting holes in the cable.

When I worked for the old Valley Cable the city of San Fernando was constructed using fused disk cable for trunks and distribution and during periods of celebration the local Hispanic population would shoot guns in the air. With this type of cable the hole might be hard to see from the ground and the bullet would easily penetrate the jacket and lodge in the open space between the disks shorting the center conductor to the outer shield. We always had these outages and they always happened at times when big events or Pay Per View fights were on. I had a big collection of shot out cable souvenirs back then so hopefully Time Warner replaced those cables with solid dielectric and they now use a lot of fiber to replace the old trunks.
 
We have had our problems with Time Warner in Palm Springs. For years when we had an outage at night the phone line to them was busy or a grumpy old lady would answer and say only "We know about it", click. Last year tho a friendly fellow told me exactly what caused the outage, where the repairs were being made and when service would be restored. It returned when he said it would. Our main concern with TWC is that they quietly drop LA stations without notice. A year or so ago KCBS was eleminated (non duplicated programming) in what I believe was a back room deal with the then GM of local CBS KPSP-LP. KESQ (ABC) has pettitioned the FCC twice to have not only KABC but KCAL dropped due to "lack of viewership" but the figures they presented were bogus according to the FCC. KABC filled a rebuttal. Relations between ABC and KESQ are as a result strained. KCAL didn't bother to respond. However, last month KABC vanished and now our Ch.7 is just a blank blue screen. Viewers complained to the local newspaper and TWC said they moved it up to an extra pay tier. We now have only KNBC (non-duplicated stuff) and KCAL from LA out here.
 
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