Nearly a quarter million households in the greater Louisville area are still without power in the wake of Sunday afternoon's storm. This is the result of over 5,000 broken lines and nearly 300 snapped utility poles. American Electric Power reported that over 300,000 were still without power in central Ohio and it might be six more days until everyone has power restored. Duke Energy reported 500,000 still out of service in the Greater Cincinnati area, including our service area in Northern Kentucky. Needless to say, this type of damage affects all utilities are impacted by the damage of this surprise severe weather. We are too.
Our Network Operations Center (NOC) remains without power. Those of you outside the Louisville market and those in Louisville who have power and Internet service remain online because of the back-up generators that have now been keeping us up and running for over 30 hours.
We are locating and repairing downed cables throughout the area. Some of those types of problems can not be discovered until power is restored. If your power comes back on but your cable or Internet does not, you might have a downed wire feeding your home or your neighborhood. If that happens to you, please give us a call. Please also understand that we are handling an enormous amount of calls because of the storm so we really appreciate your patience about getting through to us.
Rest assured, we're in crisis management mode right now. We're
working 24/7 to restore service to everyone as soon as possible. And we won't stop until everything is back to normal.
In case you're wondering why I seem to be directing these comments to people who can't get online to read them, it's because we know many of you find alternative ways to get online for a short time during these types of outages. Right Jake? ;-)
Update: Thanks Jake for the kind words in your shout out.
Wilmington First In DTV Flight [Multichannel News]
First, the good news: Less than one-half of one percent of the population in the test market of Wilmington, NC had trouble transitioning from analog to digital television during the recent switch. Now the bad news: that was still 1,300 households that had trouble making the transition. If the same percentage of Americans encounter problems when the nation undergoes the transition next February, we'll be talking about a lot of households watching static instead of television.
The Wilmington test revealed some common problems that television viewers encountered when their analog television signal went dark - incorrectly programmed digital converter boxes and incorrectly calibrated digital antennas among others. There is still a lot of work in front of us if we're going to make the transition occur smoothly.
FCC’s Copps: More work needed on digital transition [CED Magazine]
And that's exactly what FCC Commissioner Michael Copps says after reviewing the results of the Wilmington test. Copps has written FCC Chairman Kevin Martin asking for more DTV test markets to be designated prior to the nationwide switch in February 2009 in hopes that additional tests will reveal issues that can be resolved. Copps other suggestions include:
- Conduct additional field testing
- Dedicate a special FCC team to the needs of at-risk communities
- Ramp up the FCC Call Center
- Prepare comprehensive DTV contingency plans
- Create an online DTV Consumer Forum
- Educate consumers on DTV trouble-shooting, including antenna issues and the need to “re-scan” converter boxes and sets
- Ensure that broadcasters meet their construction deadlines
- Encourage the rapid deployment of small, battery-powered DTV sets
- Find a way to broadcast an analog message to consumers following the transition
New DOCSIS 3 Chipset: 320Mbps [Broadband Reports]
I've talked about the faster speeds promised by DOCSIS 3.0, but a new announcement from Texas Instruments pushes the speed envelope promised by DOCSIS 3.0 even further. DOCSIS 3.0 speeds are the result of bonding downstream QAM channels, and currently have a theoretical maximum speed of 160 Mbps. TI has announced a new chipset that would bond double the number QAM channels, increasing the theoretical maximum speed of 320 Mbps. While DOCSIS 3.0 is just beginning to be rolled out by cable operators around the nation, the new TI chipset won't be available until 2010.
The School of Hacking [Newsweek]
Want to learn abut how security experts program antivirus software to keep up with the latest malware threats? This article offers a good read on one professor who is teaching his students how to test the vulnerabilities of current antivirus software, and how it can be improved to meet these new security challenges.
The bottom line is that bad guys will continue to find new ways to exploit our computers' vulnerabilities with new virus and malware programming. And the good guys will continue to develop new antivirus software to outsmart these new threats.
I'm one of a very few exceptionally lucky people in Louisville who didn't lose power for any extended period. During the storm Sunday it went out for 2-5 seconds about 50 times, but with 5KVA of UPS power (battery backup for the non-techs) at home I weathered that no problem. I worked right through it all actually, my cable modem never went down. Kudos for keeping up as much as you possibly can, and best of luck to your employees in getting all the damaged lines repaired.
Posted by: Chris Buechler | Tuesday, September 16, 2008 at 11:48 PM