‘Rare situation’ cuts primary, back-up web feed back-up plan

A Mediacom outage that affected customers in three states for about five hours on Tuesday was the result of two separate incidents.

“In the rarest of rare situations, network damage occurred on both a primary route for portions of our fiber network, and the redundancy routes,” Phyllis Peters, communications director for Mediacom, said.

“Services were restored when network crews resolved the issue at the Albany, Ga., fiber location,” she said. “That resolution involved offloading the data traffic (light packets that travel on the fiber) to unused fibers that were present (spares, for contingencies) and were fused together at a connection site between Mediacom and GPW (Georgia Public Web). The first priority was to create that new fiber route with the previously unlit fiber – and doing so restored services.”

“To clarify, neither incident involved fiber owned by Mediacom,” Peters said. “That’s not to say that the same kinds of situations could not have occurred along our network fiber, (it’s) hard to plan for a construction accident,” he said.

Peters said that it is extremely rare for simultaneous incidents affecting the same areas.

“Despite that rarity, we certainly understand that this kind of service interruption is frustrating, inconvenient and even problematic to some customers,” he said.

“We regret the situation and we are appreciative to our employees and industry partners who helped resolve the issue.”