UPDATE - On Wednesday, Verizon reported that the issue had been resolved and customers should be experiencing normal service levels once again.
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ORIGINAL STORY - Some people in Los Osos say they've been experiencing cell reception issues over the past week and haven't been able to get any answers from their cell phone companies.
“Calling people and getting broken up sound, like underwater sound,” described Vid Englert, Spectrum customer.
Englert says he has been experiencing issues for the past week. A Spectrum customer living in Los Osos, he says he’s reached out about a dozen times for help since the issues began.
“They all said we don’t see anything wrong with the system. I’m going to check everything. All the system tests are good, and this has been for a week,” Englert said.
He says he even checked to make sure it wasn’t his actual phone that was the issue, driving down to Santa Maria to a specialty phone store.
“They ran tests for a while and they said nothing is wrong with my phone,” Englert said.
KSBY News reporter Sophia Villalba reached out to Charter, which owns Spectrum, and was told they’ve had no reports of service problems in the Los Osos area.
“We have no evidence of widespread outages impacting cell service. If any individual customers need assistance, they are welcome to reach out to me directly,” said Danielle Dunn, Charter Director of Communications.
Other people in the Los Osos area report having similar issues but with a different carrier.
“Really difficult due to the fact of dropped calls, sound like they are underwater, or off and on connection,” said Paula Harrill, Verizon customer.
“I went into the local Verizon store here in Los Osos yesterday. There were four people in there and everybody’s question was, 'what’s going on with Verizon?'” said Teri Capo, Verizon customer.
Harrill says the dropped calls and bad reception are more than an inconvenience.
“My mom is 85 and coming here and it’s important we have connection,” Harrill said.
“When most people don’t have landlines anymore and are dependent on their cell phones, this pretty serious,” Capo added.
Karen Neff says she started experiencing issues over the weekend.
“Each time my phone kept cutting out, it was so frustrating,” said Neff, a Verizon customer.
In a statement to KSBY, a Verizon spokesperson said:
“We understand that a third-party vendor hardware issue is impacting service for some customers in the San Luis Obispo area. Our engineers have been engaged and we have seen some restoration but we continue to work with our vendor to quickly restore service for our customers.”
It’s not known when service will be restored.
