BendBroadband on Internet outages: No company can guarantee 100 percent reliability

Published 12:00 am Friday, April 22, 2016

The Internet is a business lifeline for Michael McComb, one of a growing number of Bend telecommuters.

McComb, who with his wife, Katie Fuller, recently purchased the Sun Garden Apartments on Bend’s east side, is an international insurance broker. When his Internet service provider, BendBroadband, goes down, his professional life comes to a halt, McComb said recently.

“You literally panic and it’s funny because one of the outages was on the Sun Garden closing. I had sent all the e-signed documents, but there was one minor, modified document and I had to drive it over,” he said. “If that had been an international situation, I don’t know what I would have done.”

BendBroadband, with about 100,000 customers the largest Internet service provider in Central Oregon, since May 2014 has experienced a plague of interruptions of phone and Internet service, including one Tuesday afternoon that left 11,000 customers disconnected for several hours. No surprise then that customers who take the time to write reviews often vent on sites such as Yelp about BendBroadband service.

BendBroadband managers said some interruptions occur as a result of taking parts of its system offline for maintenance. BendBroadband experiences no more service interruptions than other carriers, they said. Plus, its parent company, TDS Telecommunications Corp., a subsidiary of Telephone and Data Systems Inc., of Chicago, is investing millions to upgrade equipment and lay more fiber-optic lines, they said. Telephone and Data Systems, a Fortune 500 company, agreed to pay $261 million for BendBroadband in May 2014.

“Because we’re the leader in market share, more people in Central Oregon are impacted when we have an outage,” said Stephanie Senner, business-to-business marketing director for BendBroadband, recently. “That is not to say we are less reliable than any other provider, we just have more customers.”

In November 2014, a driver hit a switch cabinet and knocked out BendBroadband phone, cable and Internet service to most of south Bend. In July, a semitruck collided with a utility pole, cutting service to 37,700 customers from Sunriver to Prineville for about 10 hours, according to The Bulletin archives. Tuesday, an unidentified third party caused a break in fiber-optic cable north of Bend that took out Internet and phone service for 11,000 customers from Sisters to Prineville, according to Krista Ledbetter, a company spokeswoman .

At the Crook County School District, the Tuesday outage interrupted Smarter Balanced tests of English and math proficiency, said Stacy Smith, district curriculum director. Teachers and administrators used personal cellphones and social media to communicate with colleagues in other buildings and with parents.

“We were working on a back-up plan in case the phone lines were still down Wednesday morning,” Smith said.

BendBroadband is investing in more fiber-optic cable, moving equipment away from roadways and installing redundant measures, but no company can guarantee 100 percent reliability, company managers said. TDS Telecommunications, its parent, is spending millions on improvements, said Britt Wehrman, BendBroadband director of marketing and product development.

“They’re pouring more money into some of the redundancy measures than we could as a privately owned entity prior to the TDS acquisition,” Wehrman said. “Twelve to $15 million a year, a that’s a 20-50 percent increase in terms of what we were spending annually.”

Other outages occurred due to equipment failures, according to the company. A March 2105 modem problem severed Internet and phone service to 200 customers, according to The Bulletin archives. BendBroadband also blamed faulty equipment for outages in January, February and March 2015 that interrupted voice and email service. In September, frustrated customers flooded the company call center when BendBroadband switched email platforms, a move that interrupted the service and, in some cases, required users to update settings. Even so, the fix worked, Senner said.

“We have had 100 percent uptime (on email) since making that change,” she said April 7.

Senner and other managers said customer expectations for faster Internet speeds, more bandwidth and greater reliability do not go unheard.

“I don’t think any Internet provider can provide 100 percent uptime and that’s why military facilities (and) large companies often have two diverse providers,” Senner said. “But a home-based business or teleworker, that’s just not cost-effective for them to do, but I’m certainly not going to argue with my customers and say what you want is impossible, you cannot have it.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7815,

jditzler@bendbulletin.com