XM Radio Technical Glitches

[Brian Vita]

Since late this morning XM has been having some issues with their satellite
transmissions.  On two of my radios I experienced frequent dropouts lasting
from one to several seconds, at times activating the "no signal" indicator
on the radio.  On the third radio, a stationary unit at the office, I didn't
notice the problems.  My guess is a severely reduced signal strength.
 
I attempted to call XM around 2PM and got an "all circuits were busy"
intercept.  A second call got through and dumped me into a 10 minute call
hold until I bailed.  I attempted a call around 8PM and, after 15 minutes,
got through and received a confirmation.  Around the same time a discrete
one paragraph message appear, albeit well hidden, on the XM website.
 
At 11:18 this evening XM sent out a bulk email with the following message:
 
Service Degradation Alert 

You may be experiencing temporary degraded performance with your XM
reception at the present time. XM is aware of the issue and working
diligently to resolve it as soon as possible. We anticipate full signal
strength will be restored by early Tuesday morning. 

While I can be sympathetic to an equipment failure, it would have been nice
if they had acknowledged it earlier by either a notation on the website, a
crawl on the radio display, an announcement during the various shows or, at
least an announcement while you are waiting on hold.
 
As an aside, I've been an XM customer since immediately after they went on
the air.  I've only heard a service failure once before.  In that case
something apparently went wrong with their feed to the uplink.  Within
seconds a "technical difficulties - please standby" message over a looped
bed of Sting's "Desert Rose" was playing.
 
Brian T. Vita, President
Cinema Service & Supply, Inc.
77 Walnut St - Ste 4
Peabody, MA  01960-5691
+1-978-538-7575
+1-978-538-7550 Fax
www.cssinc.com