Cut phone line strands Twin Cities businesses

By Steve Alexander, Star Tribune

Last update: October 29, 2007 - 8:53 PM

Thousands of small-business telephone customers in the Twin Cities were cut off from long-distance calls Monday morning, a long-distance reseller said, when a Verizon Communications fiber-optic cable was severed somewhere between Minneapolis and Des Moines.

One of them was Lance Fletcher, president of ElectroShops of Richfield, which sells home theater accessories through CinemaShop.com.

"This is a big deal at our company, because we sell nationally through toll-free phone lines," Fletcher said. "People usually buy from us now, before the holidays, but we've been knocked out of business."

Fletcher is a customer of long-distance reseller Popp.com, a Golden Valley firm that serves small- to medium-sized businesses. The Verizon failure affected long-distance calls and 800 toll-free calls for thousands of Popp.com's Twin Cities customers, said Karrie Willis, Popp's vice president of operations and finance.

Verizon Communications, a huge local telephone company in other states, is known here primarily for its cell-phone business, Verizon Wireless. But it also sells long-distance service to corporate customers in Minnesota through the former MCI long distance network it acquired.

The reasons for the cable break were unclear, said Linda Laughlin, a Verizon Business spokeswoman in Tulsa, Okla.

Repairs were complicated because the fiber-optic cable break was located next to a gas pipeline, but work was expected to be complete by late Monday or early today, Laughlin said. By Monday afternoon, Verizon employees were manually rerouting some phone calls to other lines, a move that was necessary because the rural cable that was severed did not have built-in redundancy as many metro-area fiber lines do, she said.

Steve Alexander • 612-673-4553

Steve Alexander • alex@startribune.com

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