Meredith Caddell, Hopkins County Chamber of Commerce Director,  served as the
moderator for Tuesday's meeting, to address local communications needs with
Verizon and AT&T.

 

Communications Solutions Sought at
Tuesday Meeting

 

by: Bobby McDonald

 

As the Alan Jackson song asked, "Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning?" Members of the Sulphur Springs Business Community, County and City Government, EDC, and other interested parties met on Tuesday, at 1:00, in the Sulphur Springs Public Library Conference Room, with representatives of Verizon and AT&T, to address the problems associated with the November 9th, 2009, communications outage, that "froze" our community. A representative of State Representative Mark Home and a member of the Public Utilities Commission was also present, to facilitate communications between the parties involved and seek a solution.

 

Local business representatives discuss their concerns about communication problems in
the great Hopkins County area, and the consequences to their businesses, with Verizon and
AT&T representatives, on Tuesday.

 

 

 

Members of the Verizon Engineering team advised that a major fiber optics cable had been severed by a contractor, working for AT&T, near Greenville, and the area did not have "redundancy" transmission to the greater Hopkins County area. "We have redundancy to our major 'hub' in Cash, Texas, but do not have it in place from that area to Hopkins County for voice lines," stated the engineers. "We're already working with AT&T to get that redundancy in place!"

Representatives of Wal-Mart, Ocean Spray, Fidelity Express, Grocery Supply, Farmers Co-op, and local financial institutions told of the many, many transactions and the loss of communications that were affected by the outage, that lasted some 13 hours, basically "freezing" the business community and any communication with customers, to let them know what was happening. "We're a financial services business operating in 26 states," expressed a representative of the local Fidelity Express, Inc. "We couldn't find out information of what was happening, we couldn't contact our customers, and we couldn't transact business. We were basically frozen, until the outage was repaired!"

 

Local ECD Director, Roger Feagley, asks about the installations and points out
the importance of them for future locations of industry to the area, as well as
keeping business working in our community.

 

When pressed for information, the representatives with the communications companies, allowed that the two companies would be working toward having an "assessment" of the installation needs, by January 29, 2010, with a target date of April 1, 2010, for the actual placement of the redundant lines to the Hopkins County area.

A question and answer period followed with it being established that communication lines with the Hopkins County Chamber of Commerce would be established and updates on the process would be sent there, so that the local business community would be informed of the progress.

 

Verizon representatives discuss the process of upgrading communications with
a representative of the PUC.

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