Recent growing pains experienced by Highland Communication Services (HCS) caused pains for some local businesses as well.
On Sunday, Jan. 15, the HCS phone service went down for approximately 24 hours, coming back up at approximately noon on Monday, Jan. 16. The outage affected anyone who tried calling an HCS number from outside the HCS network. Calls from HCS customers to HCS customers were able to connect.
Fidelity Solutions Inc. provides the phone service for HCS. According to a press release from HCS operations manager Steve Ferguson, the outage that HCS experienced was due to an I.P. configuration provided to Fidelity by an outside vendor that was not working properly.
“This conflict with the I.P. routing not only affected the HCS network, but several of the Fidelity networks,” Kurt Politte, vice president of Fidelity, said.
The phone outage had an adverse effect on some of the area’s small businesses. Restaurants E.L. Flanagan’s Sports and Spirits and Michael’s Restaurant, among others, said they were affected by the outages. In all, Ferguson estimated anywhere from six to 12 businesses were affected.
Some businesses had also encountered trouble with HCS’ credit card machines in the days before the outage. One local restaurant owner, who wished to remain anonymous, said his employees were having trouble running reports at the end of the day. The instances were random and not every day, but he said the machines would sometimes falter a few days a week. The machine was eventually replaced, but the 24-hour phone outage came shortly after. The business has since switched phone companies.
Michael’s Restaurant also experienced issues with the credit card machines. Gaye Michael, the owner of Michael’s, said a faulty machine caused the restaurant to lose some transactions from the evening of Friday, Jan. 6. The issues with the machines, which City Manager Mark Latham said was separate from the phone outage, will be addressed by Fidelity, with Michael’s likely to receive some sort of compensation for lost profit. No figures on potential losses, either from individual businesses or the city, were immediately available.
It’s not the first time HCS customers have experienced issues with the phone service. In September, four HCS customers experienced problems that caused incoming callers to receive a recorded message saying the number had been disconnected. In that instance, the problem was corrected within five days.
Michael was one of the customers to experience problems in September as well. He said the snags, while understandable for a new business, have been frustrating.
“Tomorrow, when you’re in a business like this, is costing you a ton of money,” Michael said. “It was a bad week.”
Still, Michael said the response to the problem was prompt, with both Latham and Ferguson working to ensure the issue was resolved as soon as possible. Michael also said he has no plans of switching his business’s phone or Internet service.
As for HCS, Ferguson said they’re working hard to get all the kinks out. He acknowledged the glitches are not something he takes lightly.
“This is very much a critical part of businesses in town,” Ferguson said. “They’re small businesses, and they rely on this.” Ferguson also said HCS is currently working with Fidelity to ensure that an outage of this type will not happen again.
“We realize that this caused major problems to our customers, both business and residential, and we are working to put steps in to avoid this from happening in the future,” Ferguson said. “With HCS being a start-up company there is going to be issues that we have to work through and we appreciate all of our customers patience and support.”
