Print this article | E-mail this article | Comment on this article

WVA Phone Outage Hits Hospitals, 911 Centers

By BetaNews Staff, BetaNews

July 10, 2007, 10:44 AM

A massive telephone service outage is affecting thousands in West Virginia, after FiberNet had a network failure that affected both its primary and backup systems. The problem began at 5:30am and continues to persist five hours later. Hospitals, fire departments, businesses and homes are affected.

According to individuals in the area, West Virginia's capital of Charleston is affected including the city's main hospital, along with Wirt, Wood, Mingo and Mercer counties. 911 call centers in Brooke and Hancock counties are also having problems. "Although no estimated time to repair is available at this point, FiberNet is working diligently to resolve this problem just as quickly as possible," the company said in a statement on its Web site.

Add a Comment (11 Comments)

BetaNews reserves the right to remove any comment at any time for any reason. Please keep your responses appropriate and on topic. Foul language and personal attacks will not be tolerated.

By terryl@3states.net

edited Jul 19, 2007 - 12:20 PM

We here at One Link Llc helped a lot of Fibernet's clients during the outage and if Fibernet would of asked we could of helped them as well. We are a true backup service provider. http://onelinkllc.com and ofcourse our infrastructure is sound and crosses many LATA's

Score: 0

By shilton33

edited Jul 11, 2007 - 9:17 AM

WE must remember as customers of fibernet that we are lucky to have an alternative to verizon and other companies that create monopolies. Think about our gas and electric bills, how outrageous our rates become because WE DONT HAVE AN ALTERNATIVE. If we show verizon that they will get all of our business, the rates will go up, as fibernets rates are much LOWER than verizons. This 24 hr outage means nothing to me when I keep perspective of my outrageousd gas and electric bills and how if my phone bill becomes that way, i would not beable to afford it.

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jul 11, 2007 - 11:18 AM

This 24 hr outage means nothing to me

...until you need to contact emergency services for anything.

Score: 0

By psycros

posted Jul 11, 2007 - 1:18 AM

Fibernet handles nearly all of Verizon's infrastructure work in WV. Verizon has a stranglehold on this state thanks to the numerous politicians in their pocket. With their monopoly guaranteed they have little incentive to upgrade the infrastructure or improve services. Before this is over we'll probably find out that this outage, like so many recent ones, was due to people stealing telephone lines for the copper (yeah, its that bad here). An excessive number of potential failure points in both the telephone and power networks are probably one reason that high-tech businesses won't locate here.

Score: 0

By alsicorp

edited Jul 10, 2007 - 2:27 PM

I am amazed how such a large company --telecommunications no less-- could have an outage lasting so long (after 2:30pm now).
Unbelievable.

Score: 0

By natesin

edited Jul 10, 2007 - 2:48 PM

Redundancy is a must in the network/telco world. I wonder if any one has lost a life due to this affecting hospitals and 911 facilities. I can't believe this is an acceptable business practice for such a necessary utility.

Score: 0

By eddie

posted Jul 10, 2007 - 3:35 PM

I live in the area and as far as I know there were no lives lost due to this outage, but this was a very wide area outage.. hundreds of miles so its very likely if there was one I wouldn't have heard.. yet anyway.

Score: 0

By PC_Tool

posted Jul 10, 2007 - 11:31 AM

Hey, here's a thought:

Let's put all of our communications (emergency, personal, data) in the hands of one company. That'd be great. It's not like we'd ever need a secondary carrier just in case our main carrier suffers a massive outage. That kind of thing never happens...

...right?