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Comcast Reports Political Robo-Calling Overloaded Some Phone Networks

By Tracey E. Schelmetic
TMCnet Contributor

If there's one outcome that everyone, regardless of political affiliation, looks forward to at the end of election day, it's the cessation of political calls, mail and television commercials. Robo-calls have been so heavily used this campaign season, they have, in some cases, caused overloading of phone systems. Comcast (News - Alert) has reported that the massive numbers of automatically dialed political telephone calls have actually caused service problems in New England, though the company reports that with the calls dropping off today, the problems have been alleviated.

Charlie Douglas, a Comcast spokesman in Philadelphia, reported that the volume of calls began dropping this morning at about 8:30 a.m., easing the service problems and disruptions. Douglas noted that only New Hampshire and parts of Massachusetts were affected by service disruptions.

Another Comcast spokesperson, Marc Goodman, said that the strain on the Comcast network was largely due to an increase in inbound political phone calls. Goodman issued a statement yesterday that the problems were being experienced not just by Comcast but by other carriers operating in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. According to the Patriot (News - Alert) Ledger, calls both to and from Comcast phones were encountering outages. The paper noted that the problems had begun early yesterday afternoon, with outages confirmed in Easton, Hanover, Hull, Sharon, Medfield, Hartford, Holyoke and Dover, New Hampshire. As a result, Comcast was obliged to reroute some phone traffic to try and eliminate the disruptions.

“As soon as we were made aware of the congestion this was causing, we began to re-route traffic around it. At the same time, we are working hard to identify the carrier that owns the originating telephone numbers generating these unusual traffic volumes in an attempt to address the situation,” said Goodman.