Mediacom's Internet service has been suffering an outage in the Riverside County area of Southern California for 7 straight days now.

Mediacom services the Sun City and Menifee Valley area in Riverside County.

Service went down on Thursday morning, October 15, 2009, and as of this writing, it's still down.

Unfortunately for me, I rely on Mediacom for my highspeed Internet access at home. I discovered the service outage as soon as it happened Thursday morning.

I called Mediacom's customer service line, and was automatically routed into their automated help desk, which features "Chatty Cathy" a robot that attempts to help customers with Internet service outage. Unfortunately, after 20 minutes of telling to me unplug and plug the modem, and check my operating system, she could not help me.

I was routed to a human being, who told me right away there was service outage in my area, and that all Mediacom customers in that area were down also. "Well, why couldn't Chatty Cathy have said that right away?" I asked.

Two days later, still after no service, I called Mediacom again. Now I got an automated response that Internet service was still down in my area. So, I hung up and continued waiting.

Two days later, I called Mediacom again. Now, there was an automated message saying that my area has no service outage. I was routed automatically into Chatty Cathy again. I hit "0" on my phone to break out and get a human being. I was told that despite the automated message saying there was no service outage in my area, service was still out. The customer service rep offered to credit my account for 5 days of no service. I asked what was going on. They couldn't tell me. I asked how long do I have to wait, and they couldn't tell me.

So today it's now 7 straight days of downtime, and apparently no end in sight.

Mediacom is a cable television provider that also offers Internet through the same cable. I use them for television as well, and so far the television is fine. It's only the Internet that's down.

Update (Oct 22, 2009): I placed another call to the customer service last evening, and this time I got a hold of someone who offered to dispatch a technician to my house. This customer support girl said she was not aware of any service outage in my area, unlike the other customer support people I had talked to previously. So you can imagine my frustration of having been told to sit and wait the past week.

Early this morning, I also received the blog comment below from Jon, the supervisor at my local Mediacom office. He called me on the phone later on and said he would personally visit my house to check things out. Later on, he did.

He and his techs found the problem outside of my house. He said there's been a lot of "noise" coming from a lot of outgoing signals, and so last week a tech had placed a noise filter on it, that inadvertently caused my Internet connection to stop.

Apparently the "service outage" that had been reported was true based on this "noise" in the neighborhood, but it wasn't all of Menifee that was affected, which is what the customer support had originally confirmed with me. Either way, I'm back online now, and a big thanks to Jon for being very helpful and responsive.

If I learned anything from this it's that you can't sit and wait, even if a customer support person advises you to do so. It pays to keep calling and calling until your problem has been resolved.   ✓