Internet service back up

Thousands of residences and businesses throughout Northwestern Ontario were without Internet services for about 12 hours yesterday after a Bell Canada fibre optic cable was damaged in Thunder Bay.
The cable was severed by a construction crew at the corner of John Street and Belrose around 1 p.m., causing a network-wide outage across the 807 area code.
The outage affected all Bell Canada Sympatico customers between Marathon and Fort Frances, as well as other Internet careers, including Vianet here.
Service was restored around midnight after Bell technicians spent several hours working at the scene.
TBayTel customers also lost text messaging services, noted company spokesman Kevin Burns.
“The damage has also affected roaming services to our regional network for voice and data services,” he added.
Here in Fort Frances, the Internet outage caused headaches for many businesses. Some debit card and lottery machines also were down on and off throughout the day.
“It’s pretty bad,” said Annie Flamand at Mohawk. “There’s lots of people coming in and, of course, the jackpot’s 43 million right now and we can’t get them tickets.
“Every other customer coming in would like to buy tickets,” she added.
Meanwhile, computer and ATM systems were down throughout the afternoon at both the CIBC and Northern Lights Credit Union branches here.
But Safeway and Wal-Mart weren’t affected by a disruption in service for even a minute yesterday.
Businesses using other networks, such as Shaw Internet or dial-up, didn’t even notice others were down.