Work crews down Road Runner service

Fiber Optics Weekly Update, Dec 31, 2004

Nearly 37,000 subscribers in Galveston County and some parts of Harris County were flattened on the information super highway recently after construction workers cut a fiber-optic line, downing their Road Runner Internet service.

Time Warner Cable, which owns Road Runner High Speed Online, said the incident occurred at about 8 a.m. when an excavation shovel struck a pole holding a fiber-optic line.

Road Runner High Speed Online, which uses a cable line and not a phone line, bills itself as a blazing fast alternative to dial-up service and promises to keep customers connected.

The accident is an expensive one for Time Warner, which will credit the accounts of consumers who notify the company about the outage.

"There were 37,000 customers without service for five hours," Ray Purser, a Time Warner spokesman, said. "We view that as pretty significant."

Time Warner, Purser said, intends to make the company who damaged the line financially responsible. The name of the company was not immediately available.

Time Warner, the dominant cable provider in the area, has about 750,000 Road Runner customers in the greater Houston area.