Comcast, Houston’s largest internet service provider (Xfinity and Comcast Business) is giving a behind the scenes look at the massive restoration efforts that have been underway following Thursday’s extreme storm.
It’s been an all-hands-on deck operation since the weather event. Hundreds of Xfinity and Comcast Business technicians start each day loading up on supplies to fix whatever they may encounter along their way. Xfinity technician Joshua Castleman made sure he had a new amplifier on hand as he investigated a service outage in northwest Houston Monday.
“We’re going to go to a neighborhood that was out entirely,” Castleman said. “It has since returned, and there’s a section of the neighborhood that’s out.”
After taking a closer look, Castleman diagnosed the issue– the amplifier was damaged, possibly from a surge or lightning strike. A quick swap, and services to the neighborhood were restored.
It’s this kind of work that’s happening across Houston. As power is restored, the company’s technicians can better see the trouble areas. Woven into the network, AI is being used to pinpoint outages and signal where technicians should go next.
The good news, Comcast’s critical equipment and tech hubs were not damaged by the storm. Some are without power but are running on generators, so internet service is available to customers.
“We’re doing everything we can to make sure our services are working,” Castleman said.
As for what’s next for Castleman and the other technicians? They will continue to make service calls and do what needs to be done to reconnect those who lost service. As power continues to be restored, there will be more areas to investigate and more work to do to help customers get connected again.
Comcast has set up ComcastTexas.com/alerts to keep customers and others informed of restoration progress.
