Hurricane Update: Over 8 Million Cable Subs Lack Service

The FCC says that in areas affected by Hurricane Irma in Florida, Georgia and Alabama, 8,275,789 cable subs lacked service, up slightly from 8,190,407 the day before.

That is as of 11:30 a.m. on Sept. 14 and according to the FCC's Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS), which relies on voluntary self-reporting of communications status by the affected providers.

Nine more radio stations got back on the air in affected areas, with 30 currently off, down from 39 the day before. Nine TV stations remained off the air, down 1 from 10 the day before.

Related: FCC's Pai, Clyburn to Assess Irma Damages First-Hand

The cellular service picture was mixed. Alabama saw an uptick of cell site outages to 1.2% of sites in reporting counties, up from .6% the day before, Florida had 13.4% outages, down from 18.1%; Georgia saw improvement to 2.2% outages from 5.3% the day before; and Puerto Rico had 6.3% outages, down from 10.1%. The Virgin Islands remained hardest hit, with over half the cell sites (53.8%) down, about the same as the day before.

The FCC Thursday deactivated the DIRS system for Alabama, Georgia and Puerto Rico, but it remains in effect for select counties in Florida and for the U.S. Virgin Islands—St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John.

(Photo viaThe National Guard’s flickrand taken by David Sterphone. Image taken on Sept. 12, 2017 and used perCreative Commons 2.0 license. The photo was cropped to fit the 16x9 aspect ratio.)

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.