Residents living on and near King Road, just outside of Petaluma, are complaining about repeated Xfinity internet outages; the company says they’re not as widespread as the residents say.|
JENNIFER SAWHNEY
PETALUMA ARGUS-COURIER
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The people who live on and near King Road, northwest of Petaluma, work in various fields: An accountant runs her business from home. A college professor teaches classes online. Another resident owns a home-based architecture and design studio.
Though their occupations don’t intersect, they all require a stable internet connection to do their jobs. The week of March 11, after a few stormy weeks, that connection stopped, with some losing their Xfinity internet service multiple times for as long as five hours a pop.
That week was the worst of it, but it’s been happening all year, they say. Architect Chris Lagos estimates his home has had no internet with no advance warning or explanation dozens of times since Jan. 1.
While the outages have been frustrating, things boiled over for Lagos and his neighbors in mid-March, when they spotted Xfinity crews in their neighborhood as outages hit. Why weren’t they warned, they wondered?
“I’m upset that I haven’t been (notified) that these things are going to happen,” said Keith Devlin, who teaches online university courses and creates video-based math games from his home.
Later this year, Devlin will be giving twice-weekly lectures for students in Denmark. He worries that if the internet goes out, “it wouldn’t affect me monetarily, but it would certainly affect my credibility as an overseas professor giving remote courses.”
For its part, Xfinity says it is aware of some problems and has been working to fix them. But a company official disputes that the outages have been as widespread as the residents say.
The week of March 11, technicians responded to numerous work orders on King Road and were doing preventative maintenance and weather-related service repairs tied to the storms, said Jon Koriel, public affairs manager with Comcast California, an Xfinity sub-brand.
“At Comcast, we continue to assess and invest in our network and in our infrastructure, performing the proper upgrades and maintenance, to ensure all our customers have the services they need to stay connected,” Koriel said in an email.
“We have technology set in place to alert us of outages to include multiple occurrences — we haven’t seen that being the case” on and near King Road, he added.
But residents say they each have had at least one outage since mid-March — with no adjustments to their bills.
“The impact on my business life is total,” said Trudy Balston, the CPA who saw her tax-season work disrupted by the March outages. “My clients’ files are on a hosted server. All my programs are internet-based programs … there's very, very little I can do without internet.”
Her home office is connected to Xfinity business service.
Customer service complaints
Balston contacted Xfinity on March 13 about an hour and a half into a roughly five-hour outage. “They told me that they were doing some service on the lines” and that the internet would return in about “three hours. ... There was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t contact anyone else. I just had to wait,” she said.
To make matters worse, cellphone service is spotty in that area, Devlin said, with many relying on Wi-Fi to make calls. After he got “some kind of a connectivity” through his phone during the outages, he’d visit the online outage map and report the problem.
The internet provider offered “pretty poor” information on how long it’d take before service was restored, he said.
“Several times it would say something like, ‘We expect to have this back on at 2 p.m.’ or something. And it was like 5 or 6 p.m., when it sort of came back on. So it was as if they didn’t know what was really going on,” Devlin said.
Lagos, whose design studio relies on cloud-sharing services, said he also usually reports the problem from his phone and will opt in for text updates. But, “they don’t update me,” he said.
Customers can get updates through the Xfinity App, follow the Xfinity outage map or sign up for text updates, Comcast’s Koriel said. Business customers, like Balston, “will be notified through the My Account portal or on their Comcast Business App” for “real-time service updates or enroll in outage texts,” Koriel said.
The app does not keep track of past notices and it doesn’t show the number of past outages residents have experienced, Koriel said. The only place customers can see past notices are through old text message updates ― that is if they already signed up, he said.
Xfinity, Koriel added, is making plans to send notices about planned outages as part of customers’ bills. It is unclear when that will roll out, as the company is still “road mapping the logistics around that,” he said.
