Lampasas: City and AT&T reach solution for phone, internet outages

The city of Lampasas and AT&T are working toward a solution for service outages caused by fiber optic line cuts throughout the summer.

Wednesday, city officials and representatives from Scott Cosper’s office met with AT&T officials to discuss how to move forward.

“We are concerned about these repeated cuts caused by other companies to our fiber that serves the Lampasas community,” AT&T – Texas Assistant Vice President of Public Affairs Adrianna Bernal said. “We are investing in a diverse route that will provide redundancy in case these cuts continue."

Since May, Lampasas has lost phone and internet services due to companies accidentally cutting the main line in the ground.

The latest cut and outage was on September 14th.

Most cities have what’s known as a redundancy line, which serves as a backup in the event that the main line is damaged.

Lampasas does not currently have a redundancy line, meaning each time the main line was cut, the entire city, and parts of the county were left without any modern communication.

The outages created a public safety concern as people in the city couldn’t reach emergency services, businesses could not operate, hospital records could not be accessed, and even the school districts were put at risk.

City officials said they are pleased with AT&T’s announcement to start work on a backup line, but they said it was a long process to get to this point.

“We felt like we weren't a priority on AT&T's list, so when we had outages, and we had businesses that were losing thousands of dollars, and we were calling and we were trying to get reimbursements, and we were trying to get answers, and we were trying to see if there were future projects for infrastructure for Lampasas, we just weren't getting a good response from AT&T,” Lampasas Economic Development Director Mandy Walsh said.

Walsh said she and the city are hopeful that their plans will keep a complete outage from happening again.