Phone and Internet Restored after 3 Weeks without Service

The community on Weekly Creek Road, just outside of Myrtle Point, was without internet or phone service for three weeks. Service provider Ziply was very unresponsive to inquiries from residents, and representatives from the county gave similar treatment, as each organization pointed fingers at each other.

The residents of Weekly Creek, a community of mostly seniors, rely heavily on the services provided by Ziply Fiber. Not knowing where else to go, resident Carol McCarthy sent in a news tip to the World to make us aware of the situation. McCarthy was obviously concerned for her neighbors, one of which is struggling with Multiple Sclerosis and needs phone and internet to keep in touch with family and medical services.

The source of the issue seemed to be huge miscommunication between the county, Ziply, and their contractors.

“It’s not our infrastructure,” said a county representative when asked about the outage, “We don’t have any jurisdiction. It’s their services that they install, and then they bill the clients for. The county has no oversight over that.”

This is contrary to what a Ziply maintenance worker said when they initially came out to check the breakage. They had suggested that the road needed repair first. Residents of Weekly Creek had suspected that some semi-regular flooding, and a frequent number of large trucks travelling down the road had contributed to the shoulder slipping, and that service poles may have been affected.

When explaining the situation to a Ziply representative, the response was fairly telling. Upon revealing that I was a reporter, and residents on my beat had been waiting for repairs for going-on three weeks, the customer service rep scrambled to get a hold of someone in the Communications department.

I was given the contact of Ryan Luckin, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Ziply Fiber. Within 24 hours, Luckin stated he was looking into the problem and had sent a crew to fix the issue, though without any explanation as to why it had taken so long.

After following up, Luckin provided an answer:

“Ultimately, this is a case of miscommunication and falls well short of the customer care experience we’re committed to delivering,” said the Ziply Communications VP, “We were made aware of the cut on 4/7 and dispatched one of our technicians to get eyes on the situation, which he did. The repair work was such that it required us to engage a 3rd party construction contractor for support. Unfortunately, that company was unable to locate the cut (which happens), but failed to make us aware of this and ask for further clarification. We should have done a much better job of following up to ensure repairs were underway.”

This is an underwhelming response from the company. Whether reliant on a contractor or not, the issue had been on the company’s radar and residents called frequently to make sure they stayed on that radar. From my perspective, they were clearly rattled into action when they heard a reporter was snooping around.