By SHANNON HAUGLAND
Sentinel Staff Writer
Technicians at GCI Communications were hard at work this afternoon to restore cable TV service in Southeast and Southcentral.
Some homes in Sitka have reported sketchy TV reception on many channels in their GCI cable service over the past several days, and at around 2:20 p.m. today there were reports that GCI cable TV reception was completely down.
Heather Handyside, senior director of corporate communications for GCI in Anchorage, said GCI heard about the problems only within about 24 hours or so, and has been working to restore service.
“The last report I heard, 15 minutes ago, was that they had restored HD (high definition) channels, but were still working to restore SD (standard definition) channels,” she said around 2:45 p.m. today. “Until we complete the process there can still be irregularities.”
She said irregularities on the HD channels were noticed Thursday morning.
Handyside said the company has been working to restore service from the GCI technical assistance center in Anchorage, and a technician has been sent to Sitka from Juneau to help.
“We’re still working on it and we’re hoping to have everything restored soon,” she said. “We appreciate our customers’ patience and we’re sorry for the interruption, and we’re working hard to restore service.”
A call to the GCI 800 number to report TV reception problems is answered by a recording saying there are cable outages in Homer, Kodiak, Juneau, Kenai, Seward and Sitka, and that a call to report the problem “is not needed at this time.”
