Hurricane Ida dealt a lot of damage, not just to the power grid but also to the telecommunication companies’ systems that provide internet service.
Some telecom customers are getting money back or discounts on their bills for the weeks-long internet and TV outage. Jefferson Parish Councilman Deano Bonano asked Erin Monroe Wesley with Cox about those customers’ status.
“What credits are you planning to give customers who received outages from August 29th, forward,” asked Bonano.
To which Wesley replied, “Customers who have been impacted by Hurricane Ida are already receiving credits.”
However, many Cox customers still got bills for the full amount. Cox insists they will make adjustments.
Meanwhile, Eric Jones with AT&T says they will handle credits on a case-by-case basis upon request. He says their cell phone customers will not see bills for going over their data limits or other limits.
“If there are any overages when it comes to mobile whether its prepaid or post-paid, we are waiving those charges.”
However, according to AT&T’s website, the majority of cell phone data plans the company offers do not charge overage, instead they throttle-down data speeds at no additional overage charge.
Many Charter-Spectrum Communications customers complain they are still offline.
“It’s a problem. It’s the elephant in the room. Their efforts need to be a lot better,” Tangipahoa Parish President Robby Miller told WWL’s Newell Normand about his frustrations with Spectrum cable and their lack of transparency.
He says the company is not forthcoming with information about their recovery, which he says makes it difficult to plan other recovery efforts in the parish.
“My message to all our [internet] providers was, gives us the truth…gives us the hard truth. Let our people have the opportunity to plan what they need to do. If you are hiding stuff from us that makes it worse because we don’t know if we need to plan for one day, or do we need to plan for two months…and we aren’t quite there yet,” said Miller. “The cloak and dagger does not work. We need hard information whatever it is.”
WWL Radio reached out to Charter-Spectrum, but they did not respond to our request for information.