Some Bertie County residents without phone and internet service by Brightspeed provider for weeks

BERTIE COUNTY, N.C. (WITN) - ​Some residents in one Bertie County town say they’ve been without phone and internet service since Dec 15.

Despite having active accounts, they say they were told by their internet provider, Brightspeed, that it will be restored.

But weeks and deadlines have passed, leaving them still without repairs.

“Why? Why does it take so long to have a technician to come out to find out what is the problem on this road?” Demetria Futrell, who came to check in on her father from Virginia, said. “I think it’s ridiculous to have a service or a company that will not provide, and come out to- not just us, but speaking on behalf of the community, it’s like everybody on this street, nobody has home phone service or internet service.”

She estimates that 20 families located on Jeff White Road have also been affected, even calling a neighbor who was told by providers that her service would be restored by Jan 6.

She says it’s even becoming a safety concern for her 86-year-old father, especially in cases of emergencies.

“Anything could happen, you know with this time of the year with the weather being cold, whether it’s 911 to go you know heat outages, or if it’s 911 to go to the hospital or anything, you can’t make calls,” she said.

She also says that Brightspeed told her family that she would need to upgrade to a 4g router box in order to have it restored.

“I refused to have that because I’m like if we’ve had this trouble ticket out, send a technician out,” she said. “Why am I going to upgrade and how is that going to happen if I do not have phone service or internet now?”

WITN has reached out to Brightspeed.

A supervisor with its technical department confirmed during a call that the family’s service is active, but that there is a cable outage present in the area.

The supervisor shared that their engineering team is scheduled to restore the outage by 5 pm on Saturday, Jan 3.

“The main reason why the internet went out is due to this cable outage that is present in the area,” a supervisor with Brightspeed’s technical department said. “I’m going to forward this one to the field engineering team to have this one sorted out as soon as possible, because if we’re checking here they already provided an estimated time of restoral for tomorrow at 5. But don’t you worry, I’m going to inform them that this should have been done as soon as possible.”

We also asked the supervisor on the phone what caused the service to be down for weeks now, but he said that the engineering team did not provide any information regarding that.

He also said that there is no direct number or email for the engineering team or for supervisors, and that all calls would have to be made through the customer line found on their website.

According to their website, Brightspeed is now the internet provider for former CenturyLink customers in certain areas.