Northeastern States Monitor Telecom in Storm; Altice Must Give Free Wi-Fi in Cablevision Areas
State public utility commissions made preparations for Tuesday’s East Coast winter storm. The New York Department of Public Service was in contact with utility senior executives and monitoring the situation, said a Monday news release: Verizon, other telecom providers and…
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energy utilities “are prepared to bring on additional manpower to minimize service disruptions, if they occur.” Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) declared a state of emergency across New York ahead of the storm, triggering conditions in the Public Service Commission's Altice/Cablevision order last year (see 1606150056). In a state of emergency, Altice, which bought Cablevision, must provide free Wi-Fi access to subscribers and nonsubscribers, must make the News12.com site available to noncustomers and share outage information with utilities at no cost, a commission spokesman emailed. Altice is in compliance with the merger conditions on states of emergency, a company spokeswoman said. The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission hasn’t heard of any telecom issues yet, a PUC spokesman said Tuesday. “We've been getting regular updates from utilities -- first about their storm prep, and now regarding outages and responses.” The PUC was closed Tuesday but its emergency management team was working in coordination with the governor’s office and Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, he said. The Maryland Public Service Commission also was closed but had engineering staff doing emergency response coordination and monitoring with the Maryland Emergency Management Agency’s state emergency operations center, a PSC spokeswoman said. No telecom outages had occurred, she said. Verizon provided a storm preparation briefing Monday to the District of Columbia Public Service Commission, which opened Tuesday after a two-hour delay, an agency spokeswoman said. There were no reports of telco outages in New Jersey, but some utility wires went down that might affect cable service, said a New Jersey Board of Public Utilities spokeswoman. New Jersey declared a state of emergency, so the board closed for the day, she said. Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, CenturyLink, Frontier and Windstream representatives reported no significant network outages due to the storm as of our deadline. T-Mobile said its "crews are addressing any issues that come up as quickly and as safely as possible."