To save cost, Highland outsources maintenance following television service outage

Highland residents will get some compensation for losing their television service this past week, as the city-owned service deals with their vendor’s technical difficulties.

Highland Communication Services is a telecommunications service owned by the city of Highland, which provides broadband, television and phone services to Highland residents who choose it over privately-owned services like Spectrum. Approximately 2,700 customers subscribe to the service, providing revenue of $3 million a year.

But the service took a hit this past week. HCS’ television vendor, Telia Corp., was doing preventative maintenance upgrading software on its router at 4 a.m. Tuesday, July 12, and the router completely failed, according to technology director Angela Imming. Telia had to find two new routers and bring them back up.

Unfortunately, Highland was left at the mercy of its vendors, Imming said, posting on social media the service — called Victory TV or VTV — would be down indefinitely.

The only impact was to the video service; internet and phone were not affected, Imming said. That means it impacted approximately 780 Highland customers out of 2,700, and service was restored at about 9:30 p.m.

While it was only about 16 hours, Imming said that had a significant impact on customers.

“This is the result of having to outsource — you lose all control over quality and reliability,” Imming said.

In the past, Highland would have conducted these repairs and maintenance itself and would have had redundancies in place to prevent this kind of problem. But Imming said continuing to handle it themselves would have cost the city $750,000 in new equipment plus $350 per household for their cable boxes.

“We knew that our customers would not welcome that cost,” she said, and thus they opted to outsource to Telia, which is based in Sacramento, California.

Imming said she has been able to negotiate a partial credit from the provider for the outage, and once it is divided up by the number of video customers, each should receive about $2.67 in credit on their monthly bill.

The average HCS TV customer is about 65 years old, and pays about $80.99 a month for 250 channels. The service is growing, with nine more subscribers this month than last. But Imming said at that the city loses about $7 per month per subscriber on video.

“As a municipality it is irresponsible to invest in something that loses money, but our priority is to make sure our citizens have outstanding high-speed internet connections,” Imming said. “We don’t like offering a product where we can’t control the quality, but there’s no way to break even (on video) unless we passed the cost on to the citizens.”

But since their primary purpose is to serve residents, Imming and her staff walk their customers through every step, including finding another service if that’s what the customer wants.

“We are here to serve our residents,” she said. “If VTV isn’t for you, you don’t have to go to the big box stores. We will help you.”

This story was originally published July 15, 2022 at 12:30 PM.