How to Respond to Internet Outages
Thunderstorm season is coming, and as a radio network, we might have more outages during those storms. Plus, you could experience internet loss due to issues inside your house. So let’s go over how you should respond during outages.
You Are a Volunteer!
First, I hope you know that LCWA is not a commercial outfit. Rather, we are a nonprofit, membership cooperative run mostly by volunteers from within our community. That’s how we make internet affordable to those very hard-to-reach spots scattered around rural Santa Fe County that we specialize in.
So, as a volunteer organization, we expect all members to volunteer in some way. However, we have limited people who actually do step up and volunteer. When was the last time you volunteered?
As a member/volunteer, the least you can do is volunteer to follow the steps below during an outage.
While these steps below put a bit more work on you as a member, they make the best use of those who do more fully volunteer. By not wasting our volunteers’ time, these steps will allow you to get the fastest fixes possible.
#1: Volunteer by Being Patient
First, if internet is down for 10, 20 or 30 minutes, just wait it out. Often, we’ll find a fix within that time and not even announce it. Or it might just be an internet supply blip on our incoming feed. Certainly, you should do some checks inside your house (like power-cycle your router), but don’t contact us about short outages like that.
LCWA is a radio-based network. The backbone radios are out in the open and exposed to the elements, and they occasionally freeze up causing a short local outage—we must remotely reboot them to get them working again. We usually discover and fix those within 30 minutes.
So just wait it out.
And don’t do this: Some members, after 10 minutes of outage, start calling us asking, “Is internet down?” But please don’t do that. We don’t have enough volunteers to handle those calls. We have nearly 850 members; can you imagine if every one of them called us every time there was a 10-minute internet blip? So you, as a member/volunteer, should wait out the short drops of internet and give our true volunteers a break. Rather, use the 800 status number discussed next.
#2: Call the Automated LCWA 800 Number and Check Internet Status first
If a problem persists more than an hour, we’ll post that information to our 800 status recording. So always check the 800 number first, before contacting us.
Dial 800 536-6149 and select option 1 and listen to the internet status message.
This should always be a member’s first step. Or you can go to our Facebook page; we usually post outages there too. And sometimes we also send out an all-member email, but not normally. Rather, you should rely on the 800 number.
But note this: it might take up to an hour for us to figure out where an outage is and how widespread it is before we report it. So if no information is yet reported on the 800 number at an outage’s early stages, that’s normal. Please wait and try calling that status message again in a bit before contacting us.
Once an outage is posted, no need to contact us, we know about it!
#3: Volunteer by Trying a Self-Repair
If no outage is recorded on our status message after an hour, then it’s likely an issue at your home, and as a member/volunteer, you should try some self-repairs. Go to this link to read some tips on how to do that. Or listen to Option 2 on the 800 number for tips. Please do that before contacting our other volunteers.
#4: After 1 Hour, Contact our Volunteer Support, & Favor Email
If your self-repairs do not work, and no regional outage is reported for your area after an hour, then contact volunteer support. There are a few ways to do that as outlined at this page on our website.
The absolute best way to get technical support is to send an email to tech.support@lcwireless.net. That creates a ticket in our support ticketing system, one we can track and follow up on, and it sends an alert to various volunteers and staff.
Note this: As a volunteer organization with limited resources, LCWA does nearly all its support by email. We can handle ten times the volume of email messages compared with voicemail. So use email.
By the way, we don’t monitor Facebook messages or replies to newsletters (like this one) or other emails. Just use tech.support@lcwireless.net (or use billing.help@lcwireless.net for payment questions)
When to Leave a Voicemail
If you have absolutely no email access, only then leave a voicemail at our 800 support line. But note it can take days for volunteers to listen to and respond to the many voicemail messages we get. So always use email, first, if you can. We respond to email quickly.
Don’t Call Volunteers or Staff Directly
In the old days of LCWA, volunteers were abundant and there were tons of people who enjoyed helping neighbors. It was fun! Many of them welcomed calls on their personal phones to fix internet issues.
But these days, volunteers are in short supply and overstretched, which is why we have the process outlined above, to direct help requests to the volunteers that are on call at the moment.
So if in your phonebook you happen to have the personal phone number of one of our volunteers, please don’t use those. Those people have a life too. They might be busy fixing the internet or might want the night off spending the evening with family.
Rather, use the official contact sequence described above.
#5: If Internet is Critical to You, Put Backup Internet in Place
By now you know this: Internet -will- go down periodically, and some outages can last a long time. That happens with even the best internet companies. LCWA does not guarantee 100% uptime and no other internet company does either. Most of you realize that and are appropriately patient to wait for our volunteers and staff to get fixes done. Thank you for that!
But some of you totally freak out when internet goes down and then respond in amazingly crazy ways. I wish I could share some of the frantic messages we get, often within less than ten minutes after internet goes down; some of them are almost funny (if they weren’t so sad).
So again, as we’ve stated in almost all our newsletters, if uninterrupted internet access is critical to your business, school, health, happiness, (or sanity), then put backup internet in place to use during any outages. It is up to you to do that. LCWA takes no responsibility for critical issues you might have due to internet being down. It’s your responsibility to have backup internet in place.
Read more about backup internet here.
Conclusion
Thank you to nearly all of you members who patiently ride through the occasional outages LCWA has. We appreciate that! And thanks for checking the 800 number status message. And thanks for waiting an hour before contacting us when no message is posted. Thunderstorm season is coming, and more internet outages are possible. So continue to use the steps above as needed.
