GREENFIELD — Greenfield Community Energy and Technology (GCET), the city’s telecommunications company, is refunding credits to customers who lost service during the provider’s outage last week.
The outage, which GCET General Manager John Lunt said was caused by a significant hardware failure in the company’s main router on Monday, Feb. 9, ended briefly on Wednesday, Feb. 11, after crews replaced the approximately $100,000 router. However, the problem reemerged Wednesday night when firmware problems led to further service outages for roughly half the provider’s estimated 2,200 customers.
“We will be applying a credit to your account that reflects a GCET outage that lasted for 76 hours this month, from Monday, Feb. 9, at noon to Thursday, Feb. 12, at 4 p.m.,” the internet service provider wrote in an email to customers. “You will not be charged for the time you were down. All customers will receive a credit based on the maximum outage time. We think this is the fairest way to proceed.”
As customers’ billing dates vary throughout the month and some GCET users have already been charged for February, the company assured customers that even those who have already been billed will see the credit reflected on their March bills.
GCET also apologized to customers who lost service, noting that the provider’s Board of Commissioners aims to improve customer communications and overall reliability.
“We deeply regret the real impact this outage had on people’s lives. We are working hard on plans to increase the resilience of the network. We also think that we must improve our communications with customers during a period like this, and we are working on a better communications plan,” the company wrote. “For those of you who voiced support during this difficult time, we thank you. For those who were frustrated or lost some faith, we hear you. For all of you, we sincerely apologize for the outage and want you to know we are working as hard as we can to make GCET safe, stable and reliable for you in the future.”