Southwest ND loses long distance again

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The area experienced the second long distance outage that has occurred in four days Tuesday. Like the outage which occurred Friday, people across the state were unable to make long distance calls Tuesday, said Consolidated Public Relations Manager Rhonda Dukart.

She did not know when the problem would be repaired, but expected service to be restored Tuesday.

Crews began working to repair the fiber that was cut Tuesday at 3:30 p.m., Dukart said.

Both incidents were caused by cut fibers, but Dukart said they are unrelated.

The fiber cut Tuesday occurred in St. Paul, but Dukart did not know where the fiber was cut Friday.

Long distance was restored at about 10:15 p.m. Friday, she said.

Dukart did not know what cut the fiber Tuesday, but said it may have been due to road construction.

“It happens in the construction season where major roads get dug up and you’ve got fiber and cable buried in the ditches and during major road construction periods these things do happen as we have found out,” Dukart said.

Consolidated customers across southwest North Dakota experienced both outages, but not all Consolidated customers were affected, she said.

“It’s a random number of customers, depending upon whose being carried on which fiber,” Dukart said. “Not everybody in the state gets carried on the same fiber. They’re split up and carried many different directions, so the ones that happen to be on this fiber in St. Paul are the ones that are out of service.”

Consolidated customers began calling about Tuesday’s outage at about 10:45 a.m. she added.

“We’re always unhappy when our customers are unable to call long distance because it reflects on us even though it’s not a situation we can control,” Dukart said. “And we do everything we can to get the situation taken care of but we’re pretty much at the mercy of the other companies that own the fiber.”

She did not know what company the fiber belongs to.

On Friday Dukart said a Qwest long distance fiber caused the outage.

However, Qwest spokesperson Carrie Amann disagrees.

“We did not have any fibers cut,” she said. “Both of them are from another provider’s issues.”

Amann would not say what company owned the fibers that were cut.

Qwest customers were not affected Friday, but those in Dickinson, Bismarck and Mandan were affected by the cut fiber on Tuesday, she said.

“It’s been down 15 minutes at the most, but it’s happened a couple of times throughout the day,” Amann said.

Neither she nor Dukart knew how many of their customers experienced difficulty Tuesday.

Tags: long distance phone service, news, consolidated, qwest, phone, local, business