Ops Deal With Blackouts

ANDREA FIGLER AND BRIAN SANTO

AT&T Broadband is feeling the pain of California's rolling blackouts.

With several cable systems in Northern California, the MSO may have been hit hardest by California's electricity problems, while others in the state prepare for their turn.

"The lights go out, the cable goes out," says Andrew Johnson, VP-communications for AT&T Broadband in San Francisco. "That's what's happening."

At least 2 million homes in San Francisco were blacked out for a time Wednesday and Thursday last week, he says.

Since the state deregulated power, wholesale electricity prices have risen so dramatically that some utilities can't afford to buy it.

As a result, the state is forcing areas in Northern California to go without power for an hour or two at a time.

These blackouts have hit subscribers in their homes and the operators at their headend server stations. Larger MSOs appeared ready to deal with the problem, with their own generating facilities. Smaller operators may have more problems dealing with outages.

"We all have FCC-required back-up supplies," says Johnson of AT&T Broadband. "So even though there's power down in their house, there's still video signals being sent down their lines.

In some areas, however, power is restored to homes before it is to a headend facility, causing a 10- to 15-minute lag time for cable service, he says. Most consumers know the blame falls on the power companies rather than the cable operators and have refrained from flooding AT&T Broadband with calls, Johnson adds.

Cox Communications in San Diego has yet to face a blackout.

"We've had the threat of rolling blackouts in San Diego since about August," says Steve Gautereaux, VP-network management for Cox. "We're pretty comfortable our systems will work."

Cox has back-up generators for its back-up generators, especially since the company provides residential phone service as well as cable service, he explains.

"If we have a problem with power outage, their phones will continue to work," Gautereaux says.

Cox installs generators in the field when it adds new telephone customers, he says.

Smaller cable operators such as San Simeon Community Cable in Central California may not fare so well in a blackout.

"We've not had a problem yet," says Jim Seagle, systems manager. "But we don't have a generator back-up, so it could be a big problem if it hits us."

Cable modems also might present a problem, says Newton Antoniuk, manager of Terayon's broadband cable data solutions.

When the power comes back on in an area hit by a blackout, all the modems will come back on at once, looking to register with headend servers; configuration data needs to be returned.

"That might stress the back-end servers a bit, but I don't see that as much of an issue," Antoniuk says. "A lot of those servers are designed to handle thousands of requests at a time."

At the worse, Antoniuk estimates cable modem customers might face a maximum delay of 15 minutes or so in reconnecting to the network.

Terayon's Web projects manager, Matthew Ott, was caught in one of California's blackouts.

He says he switched over to a dial-up connection, and when power came back on, he switched back to the cable modem connection. "In the time it took me to reconnect, it was just there. It was a surprise, but one of those really, really nice ones."

* Bids for the national programming assets of Cablevision Systems' Rainbow Media Group were signed, sealed and delivered by last Tuesday's deadline. The assets are said to be fetching bids as high as $4 to $5 billion; interested parties reportedly include Viacom, Comcast, NBC, MGM and Sony.

* AOL Time Warner's board approved a plan at its first meeting to buy back up to $5 billion, or 2.3%, of the company's common stock, citing a belief the stock was undervalued.

* Scientific-Atlanta is increasing production of its Explorer digital set-top boxes to 6 million units annually by the end of the current quarter. S-A also announced its second quarter profits doubled to $70.8 million, beating analyst forecasts.

* Michael Collette resigned as SVP marketing and business development for ICTV to concentrate on his consulting company, MediaTech Strategies.

* AT&T Broadband signed two multi-year contracts with Convergys to handle telephone billing for residential and business customers. Under a seven-year agreement, Convergys will provide billing services to the MSO's residential customers, while a separate five-year agreement covers billing for corporate customers.