Rogers Internet, TV service down six hours in Ontario

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Wednesday July 19, 2000 Rogers Internet, TV service down six hours in much of Ontario

TORONTO (CP) - Thousands of customers of Rogers Cable and its Rogers(at)Home unit across Ontario lost their TV and Internet services Wednesday after a work crew cut a cable west of Toronto.

The company's Internet service to about 180,000 customers - primarily in the Toronto, Ottawa, London and Kitchener areas - was restored about 4 p.m. EDT - six hours after a major fibre-optic feeder cable was severed by a CN Rail crew doing maintenance on a bridge in Oakville, Ont.

A Rogers spokeswoman said the Rogers(at)Home customers could expect slower-than normal response time as the system processed six hours worth of e-mail and other data traffic that had been stalled by the outage.

No e-mails would be lost, she said.

Cable television service provided by Rogers was also disrupted in several cities starting about 10 a.m., although many channels were operating normally on a backup service within three hours. Some problems persisted on a few specialty channels even after the Internet service was restored Wednesday afternoon.

The fibre-optics cable, buried about a metre below a CN railway track, is the main link between the main Rogers communications hub in the Toronto suburb of North York and the Internet backbone in the United States.

Rogers is Canada's largest cable television company and one of the biggest Internet service providers in the country.

The Rogers(at)Home service provides faster Internet access than is available through telephone-based services but at a higher subscriber fee.

There was no word on whether other cable companies that are part of the (at)Home service were affected by the Rogers outage.

http://www.southam.com/ottawacitizen/cgi/newsnow.pl?nkey=oc&file=/cpfs/business/000719/b071959.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), July 19, 2000


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