Through the Wire
By Steve Donohue, Kent Gibbons and Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 10/28/2007 8:00:00 PM
Cabler Staffers Persevere in Fire Zones
Cable operators in California said Thursday that many employees that had evacuated their homes because of the wildfires have returned, but that the residences of several hundred subscribers have been destroyed by the fires.
About 400 homes of Charter Communications subscribers in Lake Arrowhead, Calif., have been destroyed, said Craig Watson, vice president of Charter’s Western Division.
Although Lake Arrowhead residents were ordered to evacuate, many remained at their homes, including three Charter field technicians. The homes of the technicians were not damaged, Watson said.
At Charter’s Malibu system, the fire in the area had been completely contained by Thursday. While cable TV service hasn’t been knocked out in Malibu, Charter plans to replace trunk lines that have been damaged by heat.
In San Diego, most employees that staff the Time Warner Cable system there were allowed to return to their homes late Wednesday, VP of public affairs Marc Farrar said.
“We are back to just about full staff on board today [Thursday]. We were pretty close to that yesterday,” Farrar said. “In terms of CSRs [customer-service representatives] and technicians in the field, we are trying to get back to normal operating conditions as much as we can.”
Time Warner estimates that about 300 homes of its customers in the San Diego have been destroyed by the fires, Farrar said.
Only about five Time Warner employees who live in San Diego remain evacuated from their homes, Farrar said. “We have not learned of any employee homes that were victims of the fire,” he added.
Local authorities used a reverse-9/11 system last week to relay evacuation notices to residents in San Diego and other parts of California threatened by the fires. Time Warner offers digital phone service in San Diego, and successfully relayed reverse 9/11 calls, Farrar said.
Cox Communications media relations director David Grabert said Thursday that fewer than 1,000 of Cox’s 530,000 video customers in the San Diego region were affected by fire-related outages, but that about 90% of them had already been restored.
He said Cox headquarters had unconfirmed reports that some employees had lost their homes, but even those employees forced to evacuate their homes had come to work Thursday.
“We’re doing like we do in crises,” Grabert said, noting Cox systems hit by hurricanes in recent years have helped the company prepare, practice and exercise emergency responses. “We take care of our employees, we take care of our customers, then we reach out to our communities.”
Some calls in the region were diverted to other call centers, due to high volume, he said.
Triple Play of Memorials For Cox’s Jim Robbins
This past Friday, a by-invitation memorial service in Atlanta for Jim Robbins, the former Cox Communications CEO who died of cancer on Oct. 10 at age 65, was expected to draw perhaps 2,000 people to pay respects, including invited guests and any of the 1,200 Cox employees in the Atlanta area who wished to attend.
The next day (Oct. 27), a public memorial service was scheduled for 11 a.m. at All Saints Episcopal Church in Atlanta.
The first public memorial service for Robbins was held in Boston on Saturday, Oct. 20, followed by a private interment.
Robbins had close ties to both the Boston and Atlanta areas, hence that pair of services to accommodate family and friends in those communities.
Friday’s memorial — to have been Webcast to Cox locations around the country — was to feature remarks from several Cox employees, representing diverse members of Robbins’s team. As Cox spokesman David Grabert noted, the man (Robbins) who created the job of chief people officer (a post held by Mae Douglas) would want it that way.
On the list: Cox Enterprises chairman James Kennedy; Cox Communications president Patrick Esser; Cox Oklahoma VP and region manager Dave Bialis; Linda Tabor-Nichols, Robbins’s former executive assistant; senior systems administrator Franklin Warlick; and CFO Jimmy Hayes.
Grabert said the Friday service, at the Cox Enterprises building in Atlanta’s Dunwoody area, was planned as “a remembrance and celebration of Jim Robbins that will include some light-hearted moments that are a reflection of Jim’s personality and spirit to move on through anything.”
Debby Robbins and their three daughters were among family members expected to attend.
AP Rethinks, Says Comcast Actually Doesn’t Block P2P
You may have missed a key follow-up to the story the Associated Press filed Oct. 19, which asserted that Comcast “blocks” file-sharing application BitTorrent in some cases — a dispatch that was absolute catnip to “Net Neutrality” advocates, who pounced on it as evidence that the federal government needs to start regulating the way Internet providers manage their networks.
The alleged smoking gun: The AP tried to share a digitized copy of the King James Bible using BitTorrent software and Comcast’s cable modems, and claimed that two out of three attempts to share the file were blocked altogether.
But last week, the AP issued an update to the story, as pointed out by IP Democracy blogger Cynthia Brumfield. Rather than blocking P2P traffic, the later AP article says, Comcast merely subjects such file-sharing to delays. “In one case, a BitTorrent file transfer was squelched, apparently by messages generated by Comcast, only to start 10 minutes later,” the AP’s Oct. 23 article said. “Other tests were called off after around 5 minutes, while the transfers were still stifled.”
Hmm. Sounds a bit like saying the Holland Tunnel is closed, whereas in fact traffic is subject to 5- to 10-minute delays. So you can’t start downloading your pirated copies of Spider-Man 3 or Ratatouille right away? Boo-hoo, brother.
If you’re feelin’ holy, by the way, the Bible’s already posted all over the Web.
