ADVANCED CABLE COMMUNICATIONS

OUTAGE PROCEDURES

(February 2007)

1. An “outage” is defined as: a reception or connection problem affecting 4 or more customers in the same area, where the customers are not able to connect, receive and/or view their services. This includes those interruptions that are planned (plant maintenance) and unplanned. The following situations that would be considered as an outage when affecting 4 or more customers in the same area:

· The complete loss of reception or “unviewable reception” on a number of video channels or a common single channel.

· The loss of connectivity to the High Speed Data (HSD) service (un-acquired modems). If a plant or Headend issue is only affecting the reverse signal, it is still considered an outage.

2. Outages are detected or identified in several manners:

a) By the Dispatchers checking the pool for All Day TC’s on a regular basis during the day and seeing that there are 4 or more TC’s listed for no service within the same area.

· Inasmuch as All Day TC’s represent customers who have called and reported that they have no service at all or totally unviewable reception, the Dispatchers will periodically review the calls that have been placed in this quota category pool. If the Dispatchers identify 4 or more calls reporting no service in the same confined area, they will declare a potential outage.

· The designated Tech for the affected area will be contacted and advised to respond to the potential outage.

· A “Flash Message” will be sent to all appropriate Customer Care staff, OTG and other designated recipients.

b) By Techs or Contractors that have situations with compelling needs to interrupt service to 4 or more customers. This would include activities such as changing out a piece of active or passive equipment, replacing a connector on a piece of equipment and/or replacing a piece of distribution cable.

· For those situations where Techs or Contractors have compelling needs to interrupt service to 4 or more customers during standard day & evening operating hours, they must call Dispatch at least 15 minutes before interrupting the service and provide certain information regarding the planned interruption. This will allow time for Dispatch to prepare and distribute a “Flash Message” to all appropriate Customer Care staff, OTG and other designated recipients. In these situations, the Flash Message advises recipients of the area that will affected by an interruption and the approximate length of time that the service(s) will be down. Our Customer Care staff is then prepared for the anticipated telephone calls from customers and can give them information on the estimated length of time that they will be affected.

c) When Customer Care and/or OTG is taking a high volume of calls for loss of service in the same area.

· In these situations, Dispatch would be advised by Customer Care and/or OTG of the volume and type of calls being received and general areas affected. Dispatch would immediately review the All Day TC’s pool to determine the parameters of the areas being affected.

· The designated Tech for the affected area will be contacted and advised to respond to the potential outage.

· A “Flash Message” will be sent to all appropriate Customer Care staff, OTG and other designated recipients.

d) When the Tech Ops staff has made plans for performing certain plant work that will interrupt service to 20 or more customers. This would include activities such as replacing or adding a piece of major equipment or cable in the plant, noise mitigation work on the fiber/distribution plant, and/or headend work.

· Whenever possible, planned maintenance or repair work on the plant that will involve service interruption to a large number of customers will be scheduled for early morning hours (2am to 6am). Advanced notice for this planned work and the area(s) that will experience interruption to services will be provided to Customer Care, OTG and other designated recipients.

· The Techs working on the planned early morning hour’s service interruption will contact OTG prior to beginning the work to advise them of the start time. They will also contact OTG at the conclusion of the work for verification of service restoration.

3. Dispatch will contact the designated Tech for the area where a potential outage has been declared. During hours where Dispatch is not staffed, OTG will make such contact.

· During regular hours for technical field operations, if Dispatch is not able to make contact with the designated Tech after several attempts over a 15 minute period, then the appropriate Technical Supervisor should be contacted immediately.

· Also, the appropriate Technical Supervisor should be contacted by Dispatch for situations were the Tech has been contacted but cannot respond to the outage within 15 to 30 minutes due to circumstances where they are already engaged in other work which can’t be completed within 15 to 30 minutes. The Technical Supervisor will take action to identify another tech or other resources to respond to the outage.

· During non-regular hours for technical field operations, if Dispatch or OTG is not able to make contact with the designated Tech after several attempts over a 30 minute period, then the appropriate Technical Supervisor should be contacted immediately.

4. Dispatch should be contacted by the Tech(s) as soon as possible upon arriving at the outage and having information on the circumstances involved and the Estimated Time to Repair (ETR).

· On situations where the restoration will require major work and time, the Tech(s) will provide Dispatch with timely information so that subsequent follow up messages will be sent out to keep employees and customers informed on the progress for restoration and any updates to the ETR.

· When applicable, it is acceptable and important to advise employees and customers if the outage is due to other parties. We should let customers know when the outage is due to a cut cable or other circumstances caused by another party and not an equipment failure. This would apply to situations such as when a utility company or developer construction crew cuts or damages our plant. Other examples would be situations were the commercial power ahs gone off in an area, when power lines have fallen onto our plant due to utility or tree trimming work, vehicle accidents where our plant has been hit and vandalism/theft to our equipment.

5. All outages must be listed on the Outage Logs kept in Dispatch. There is a separate Outage Log for both the Weston & Coral Springs systems.

· The data contained in the Outage Log is used for a number of important purposes, including compilation of reports to our local franchise officials. It is important that the data in this log is accurate and complete at all times.

· All planned and unplanned outages affecting 4 or more customers must be logged.

· The Dispatch Lead and Technical Supervisors are responsible for insuring that the outage logs are filled out in a timely and accurate manner.

· The outage should be completely listed in the appropriate Outage Log as soon as the outage is repaired. If nobody is available to complete the log immediately upon the repair of the outage, then the log should be completed at the earliest opportunity.

· The actual problem found to be causing the outage and the action taken to restore service should be provided by the responding Techs and must accurately represent the primary action that fixed the outage.

6. The Tech directly involved in restoration of an outage is required to complete an individual report for each incident involving a plant/Headend outage, immediately upon completion of the repairs.

· These individual outage reports should be completed and submitted to the appropriate Technical Supervisor, as soon as possible following the outage. These reports will be reviewed to insure that all data pertaining to the outage and its repair are accurately stated.

7. The Technical Supervisors will record and track in a separate log, the occurrence of outages by Nodes/areas/causes, so that any trends or repeat occurrences can be identified and addressed.

· The appropriate Technical Supervisor(s) will meet no later than the following morning with those Techs involved in the repair of outages to discuss the root cause of the outage, actions taken for the repairs and any follow up needed.

· The data provided on the individual report will be compared to the data on the Outage Log to insure that both are accurate representations of the incident.

· The root cause for such incidences needs to be identified and repaired so that they do not continue. This includes any outages that are intermittent and the field techs were unable to determine the cause because the service came back on by itself. These situations need to be followed up on to identify the cause of the intermittent loss of signal/service, to avoid a repeat occurrence.