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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

Midco customers hit with several outages in recent weeks

Keith Vandervort
Posted 12/13/18

REGIONAL—The Ely and Tower areas have been hit with three major interruptions to Internet, phone and cable TV service from Midco since early November. All of the outages lasted several hours and …

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Midco customers hit with several outages in recent weeks

Posted

REGIONAL—The Ely and Tower areas have been hit with three major interruptions to Internet, phone and cable TV service from Midco since early November. All of the outages lasted several hours and disrupted numerous commercial and retail business in the area as well as numerous residences. The outages were reported to be caused by cuts to the fiber network, but not necessarily anywhere near the Ely area.

In early November, a cut to Midco’s fiber network happened just outside of Ely, near the Ely Golf Course. The outage lasted as long as eight hours for customers in the Ely and Babbitt areas. “I was told that the outage occurred somewhere between here and Babbitt,” said Ely City Clerk-Treasurer Harold Langowski, “and they only place that anybody was digging was near the Golf Course.”

Lake Country Power was reported to be working in the area that day.

Another Midco daytime outage was reported on Nov. 25. Facebook posts from Midco read:

“Nov. 25 at 9:53 a.m. - Ely-area customers: Services are currently unavailable due to a fiber cut in your area. A crew is on its way to investigate and resolve the problem. We apologize for this inconvenience and will work to get things back up and running as quickly as possible.

“Nov. 25 at 1:40 p.m. - Ely customers: Services have been intermittent in the area – and may continue to be so while on-site teams investigate and troubleshoot. We look forward to bringing full resolution to the issue as soon as possible. Thanks for your patience.”

The most recent Midco outage in the Ely area occurred last Thursday. That outage began in early afternoon and lasted the rest of the day. A Midco Facebook post read:

“Dec. 6 at 9:30 p.m. - Attention Midco customers in Ely/Babbitt: We have contractors on site and working hard to splice fiber and repair the cut causing the service outage. We sincerely apologize for the disruption to your services – we know it affects your daily lives, and we appreciate your patience as the crew works hard to get your services back up.”

The Timberjay reached out to Midco for comment on the recent outages, and they provided the following by email:

“At Midco, we know our customers expect connectivity when they need it. Unfortunately, there have been recent service outages near Ely. Interruptions in November and December were triggered by three separate instances of contractors cutting the fiber of the underlying provider we use to connect to Ely. We know these interruptions are an inconvenience to our customers, and we sincerely apologize. We have elevated awareness of the severity and frequency of these outages to the underlying provider, and we will continue to stress the importance of service reliability for our customers.” Jon Pederson, Chief Technology Officer, Midco.