Verizon Wireless outages in Erie caused by a fiber cut, spokesperson says
Verizon Wireless began experiencing nationwide outages late Wednesday night, with a large amount of users experiencing problems in the Erie region.
As of 11:30 a.m., Erie ranks second of the most affected locations with 202 reported outages behind New York City with 376, according to the Verizon Wireless Outage Map.
Many Erie users are reporting issues with their phone service. The latest reports from users having issues are from postal codes 16509, 16506, 16503, 16510, 16502, 16504, 16505 and 16546. The most outage reports have come from Erie, Girard and Fairview, according to the outage map.
Steve Van Dinter, the director of Local Area Communications at Verizon, told the Erie Times-News that the cause for the region's service outages is due to a fiber cut to the fiber optic cable in the area.
"All our cell sites in the area are connected to our main network via fiber optic cable, and one of those cables was damaged overnight," Van Dinter said. "We don't know the cause of that yet, but engineers are working right now to get it all spliced back together."
Van Dinter described fiber optic cables as a bundle of a number of cables that need to be matched to their specific counterparts.
"If there's 100 cables, they have to match cable two to cable two, so it takes a bit of time to pull that together, but they have been working aggressively on that this morning," he said.
After the engineers fix the cable, Van Dinter expects Verizon will then be able to determine what damaged the cable. Currently, services are not fully restored in the region, and Verizon does not have an estimate as to when they will be back up, Van Dinter said.
If customers are experiencing issues, Van Dinter said they should make sure their device has WiFi Calling enabled. If done in an area that has WiFi, calls, texts and data services will work as normal.
This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Verizon Wireless outages affect cell, internet services in Erie region
