U-Verse Has an Outage
AT&T Blames Oct. 21 Service Errors On Software Upgrade
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 10/28/2007 8:00:00 PM
In this story:
SOFTWARE SNAFU
SATELLITE RUMORS
Sidebars:
Ma Bell’s Ideas For IPTV
Subscribers to AT&T U-verse TV across the country were denied access to dozens of cable channels for much of the day on Sunday, Oct. 21, after the telephone company’s upgrade of a back-end system went awry.
Meanwhile, AT&T said it has been racking up U-verse TV customers at breakneck speed. It reported 126,000 subscribers at the end of September — up from 3,000 at the end of 2006. In the last weeks of the third quarter, AT&T said it was nearing 10,000 installations per week for the service, up from 5,500 per week three months ago.
Those thousands of new subscribers would have found they had lost service to all or some of their channel lineups early Sunday morning.
AT&T restored local broadcast-TV channels and some cable news and sports channels, including ESPN, within a few hours but did not restore the full lineup to all 33 of the markets served by U-verse TV until 8:30 p.m. ET. The company said customers should have continued to have access to video-on-demand and digital video recorder content.
“We’re conducting a full internal review to make sure this doesn’t happen again in the future,” AT&T spokeswoman Destiny Belknap said.
In online forums at AT&T’s own Web site (utalk.att.com) and on the independent UverseUsers.com, subscribers reported receiving error messages informing them they were not subscribed to certain channels.
SOFTWARE SNAFU
AT&T chief financial officer Rick Lindner, on a conference call with analysts discussing earnings results last Tuesday, said the channel outages were caused by a “software load” that the telco put on its operations support system. OSS software handles tasks related to managing network devices.
Lindner said the glitch was unrelated to the U-verse TV architecture “or the scaling of the platform.”
The software load, Lindner said, “unfortunately impacted the database that’s used to track and maintain the programming packages that customers are subscribed to. And what that caused on Sunday is it caused customers to lose some channels for part of the day.”
AT&T is providing customers with credits — $15, according to message-board posts — to compensate for the loss of service. Lindner said that “since we’ve identified what the issue is, we’re going to work to make sure that it does not happen again.”
Belknap said she did not have a list of which specific cable networks were unavailable, nor did she know how many were affected. U-verse TV currently offers more than 320 channels.
SATELLITE RUMORS
Also last week, The Wall Street Journal rekindled rumors that AT&T is interested in acquiring either DirecTV or EchoStar Communications to kick-start its TV business.
The newspaper, in its “Heard on the Street” column, reported that AT&T “appears to be getting ready to swoop in” on one of the satellite companies.
The telco has consulted lawyers in Washington, D.C., to determine how long government approval would take for such a deal, according to the paper.
The Journal noted, however, uncertainties associated with a bid for EchoStar and DirecTV, including a potential price tag of $30 billion to $40 billion.
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