Hurricane Ike outage live blogging and other Monday updates

Updates: Hurricane Ike [Suddenlink FYI]

My thoughts have been with the victims of Hurricane Ike in Texas and Louisana - and the thousands in Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana who lost power or had property damage in yesterday's remnants of Ike. I noticed that Suddenlink, a cable operator that serves much of the area affected by Ike in Texas and Louisiana was live blogging their service outages and restoration of service.

Suddenlink deserves commendation for updating customers on their efforts to restore service in very trying conditions - flooding, electrical outages and wireless outages that affected their personnel's ability to communicate.

In Kentucky and Indiana, our crews are working round-the-clock to restore service to all areas as quickly as possible after the remnants of Hurricane Ike moved through and surprised everyone.  LE&G reported that nearly 300,000 customers were without power for some time since yesterday's unexpected near-hurricane force winds. 

I received an email from a customer yesterday, challenging our claim of greater reliability compared to satellite because he had lost service.

As I see the competition gain with more choices in television, more affordable internet, and now more reliable service, I wonder why stick with Insight?  Are there plans to compete in this market; particularly in television?  I want more channel choices including more HD.  Some of the competition has over 100 channels in HD! What gives?

Ouch.  But to his defense, many were surprised to learn of damages due to the severity of yesterday's winds.  Usually, 70 mph winds are accompanied by heavy downpours but, in this case, most of the precipitation passed north and south of Louisville, not over it.

I responded to this customer by reiterating my belief that cable is clearly more reliable than satellite during inclement weather. 

Many satellite customers report regular "rain fade" outages whenever it rains, even moderately.  Indeed, winds of 70 mph, as reported in Louisville on Sunday, probably took its toll on receivers mounted on satellite customers' roofs.  Those folks will be responsible for repairing the damage to their equipment and their roof while our customers can relax and allow our crews work round the clock to restore service as quickly as possible.

Further, I informed him that we will be announcing the launch of Digital 4.0 later this year in the days to come. That next version of our digital service will include an important increase in HD channels as well as other enhancement.  Be sure to watch your mail for details.

I received a quick response from the customer, who said he hadn't known the full impact of the storms until after he wrote to me.  I'm pleased to have been available to him though, and been given the opportunity to respond to his concern. 

Internet in the Sky: Surf but Don’t Call [New York Times] I wonder if the net neutrality advocates are getting their fur up over this one. Recently, American Airlines announced that they will be providing in-flight wireless Internet service to their customers. Customers will be able to surf the Internet (including some sites that American's flight attendants object to), but are prohibited from using their in-flight Internet to make VoIP calls. The VoIP prohibition is explained as a reaction to the perceived "social concerns" of a VoIP user interrupting fellow flyers with a voice call. No word yet on the reaction from the net neutrality crowd. Did 'Spore' copy protections backfire on EA? With a 7 year and $55 million investment, Electronic Arts unveiled their newest game offering called Spore last week. The game's copy-protection digital rights management (DRM) feature, designed to limit game piracy, has gained the enmity of the hardcore p2p community. Protesting Electronic Arts decision to protect their substantial investment in Spore, p2p'ers have flooded Amazon.com with negative reviews of the game and have made over 500,000 illegal copies of the game on p2p networks. It's fairly clear to me that the p2p'ers are upset that Electronic Arts has made it more difficult for software pirates to rip off their work

Comments

[David Crowell]

I have no idea if my cable is functional. I have no power. I'm assuming the guy who emailed you was one of the lucky ones who still has power.

My power has been out for over 25 hours now. My cable is lower priority for me. I want to take a hot shower.

I used to have satellite years ago, and I can attest to the rain-fade issue. It's not much fun when trying to watch a pay-per-view event.

[Pete Abel]

Thanks for the props you gave Suddenlink. We appreciate it. Good luck to Insight -- and our respective customers and employees -- in all of the areas affected by this season's storms.

[sineswiper]

In response to the Spore article, people are more upset with the unreasonable restrictions placed on computer games (and other software), especially with DRM. People should be able to OWN a copy of the game, not RENT the game for $50. (The six month "rental" period is a rip off!)

Copy protection doesn't work. At all. You can see this with the cracked versions of the game on P2P. No matter what copy protection you put on a game, it will be cracked and the game will be pirated.

Therefore, copy protection only hampers the LEGAL buyers of the software. If they are only allowed to install it on one PC, or if they can't re-install it after an upgrade, or if that installation fails the FIRST time, it's a serious detriment to those that pay for it and want to play it. Thus, they pirate just to be able to do so.

I understand the need to curb pirating, but copy protection just adds to it. It never worked in the 80's, since nobody wanted to look up the word on Page 32, paragraph 3, word 15. And it still doesn't work today.