Comcast outage effect could linger

Comcast could face significant fallout from the series of network outages that have left its cable modem customers frustrated and angry.

The company admitted yesterday that its high-speed Internet access network had suffered a third outage on Wednesday, following previous outages on April 7 and April 12. According to a spokesman, all three outages stem from Domain Name Server problems, and could well be related to Comcast's effort to centralize its server operations in two national centers, one in Colorado and another in New Jersey. For reasons the company is not yet discussing publicly, the server facilities have been overwhelmed by demand.

Comcast has also been overwhelmed by customer complaints and apparently not prepared to address the volume of calls, said cable industry analyst Gary Arlen of Arlen Communications.

"In times of real critical emergency, things get out of control," he said. "No matter how much they build for the worst possible scenario, when the worst possible scenario actually happens, it's overwhelming. This is absolutely a wake-up call and not just for Comcast, but for the whole cable industry. If they are going to promise reliability and customer service, they have to deliver."

The outages come as the cable industry appeared to be sitting pretty in the world of broadband competition--in the U.S., cable continues to dominate the residential market and is making a significant push to attract small to mid-sized business customers.

"Where this has the hardest impact is on their commercial services business--and that's where [major cable players] are making the biggest push right now," Arlen said. The repetitive outages will damage Comcast's reputation for reliability and could have a spillover effect on other cable companies as well.

Many of the Comcast customers posting complaints on BroadbandReports.com and other Web sites are as angry over Comcast's failure to alert customers to the problem and recommend solutions as they are over the outages themselves.

"How hard is it just to tell people there's a problem?" wrote one angry customer. "I called in and was put on hold for more than 10 minutes."

Arlen said the customer service aspect is troubling, particularly since the cable industry invested heavily in trying to improve its once-abysmal reputation for handling customer problems.

"This has been a very damaging process for Comcast," he said.