Sprint users wait for dial tone

A cut fiber optic phone line knocks out service for as many as 7,000 customers, leaving them with a busy signal or no sound at all when they try to use their phones.

By BILL VARIAN

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 27, 2000

LECANTO -- Rosemarie Cutchins kept dialing the number to the Citrus County government complex Wednesday morning. And she kept getting the same response.

"The line would just ring and ring but I couldn't reach anyone," said Cutchins, supervisor of the Lecanto Senior Center. "All of a sudden, bam, it was working again."

Residents and business owners around the county had similar experiences through much of the morning Wednesday -- throughout much of the day for some.

The culprit: a cut fiber optic phone line that knocked out service for as many as 7,000 customers of Sprint, said phone company spokesman Jason Duff.

Many customers continued to experience intermittent outages throughout the day as Sprint crews worked to repair the damage.

Duff said a road crew doing construction work was believed to have cut the phone line near State Road 44 and County Road 491 shortly after 8 a.m. He said Sprint was still investigating who cut the phone line.

Repair workers were able to fix most of the damage by about 1 p.m. But some phone company customers continued to experience busy signals or outright loss of service.

Part of the problem was that phone calls had to be routed along different pathways that became clogged.

The outage was scattered, experienced by such distant places as Chassahowitzka and Bushnell in Sumter County.

"Fiber optics is kind of funny like that," Duff said. "It can affect something close and it can affect something far away."

Cutchins said the outage didn't cause a major inconvenience, except for her fingers.

"I practically got blisters on my fingers," she joked. "I kept dialing and dialing and dialing."

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