Re: Hot 97 blames Verizon for outages

[John Mullaney <john@minutemancomm.com>]

I actually did a two day RPU link from the roof of the Pru to Hull years ago to
put WBZ back on the air when they had lost their phone lines to Hull. After
that they installed a RF STL as a back up. All of the stations in town that are
using T1's now for their studio transmitter links have RF back ups for the same
reason. The Data groups from Verizon don't treat radio any different than any
of their other customers unlike the service from Broadcast Services that radio
has been use to over the years for their analog lines. However even with analog
lines no station with a larger revenue stream would rely on one path to their
transmitters today.

Keith Berman wrote:

> According to an article in today's Boston Globe (which I couldn't find on
> their web site to link to, otherwise I would've just posted it instead of
> summarizing), WBOT said that they were off the air for 14 hours last
> Wednesday because of problems with Verizon.  Apparently, their T1 line
> between the studio and transmitter has been cutting out frequently,
> resulting in "frequent gaps in the signal [that] break up the transmission
> for one or two seconds up to four or five times a day."  WBOT says that
> problems with the T1 is also the reason why they were off the air for a
> chunk of a day over the Labor Day Weekend.
>
> The station wants to use an ISDN line for a backup, which they said should
> have been operational on Monday but wasn't.
>
> The station's engineer, Grady Moates, also slammed Verizon for not
> responding to the repair call quickly enough, saying "If this had been WBZ,
> it wouldn't have taken 14 hours to fix.  It's too much trouble for them to
> care."