Author Profile

Charles McCown

Charles McCown

Hi, I'm Charles and I work in the QA department. I have been with WOW! 7 years now and have seen many changes come along the way; from the creation of service bundling, launching of phone service, expanding out into the Evansville area and now we just launched our social networking site. I know the next 7 years will see many more changes to come, all in an effort to WOW! our customers. If you haven't had our service, I encourage you to check us out and see what all the buzz is about.

Charles McCown's Blog Posts

Here comes the Sun (Outages)

Picture the earth as viewed from orbit, blue oceans, white clouds and landmasses fill the image. Cue in the satellite and imagine it is floating in space across the field of view.   This communication satellite is quietly transmitting radio frequencies down to the earth to a receiving satellite dish.  The satellite dish interprets these RF signals into the pictures that are broadcast to and displayed on your TV set.  All is good, except for a couple of times a year when the Sun runs intereference.

Twice a year in February/March and September/October, for about a two week period, the orbitol positions of the satellite and the sun line up.  The satellite dish on the earth receives signals from both, but the sunrays are more powerful and interfere with the satellite signal causing a condition commonly known as solar fade.  Most common symptom are pictures with tiling, freezing, fuzziness, sparkliness, or even no picture (black.) 

The good news is that the degredation in picture quality or loss of picture is brief, usually lasting no longer than 15 minutes a day during the two week periods.  So, if you see that your TV picture isn’t looking quite as good as it normally does, give it fifteen minutes or so and and see if it clears up on it’s own.  If it’s sun outage related it will; if it’s not, it won’t and you will want to give us a call.

In Education posted March 12, 2010 at 7:00 am

Waiting on Call Waiting

Call waiting, it’s only one feature amongst many, and it’s an important one.  You gave us lots of feedback and we  responded.  Many of you have been “waiting on” having an option to turn off call waiting and now you’ve got it.  So, take a moment and think about how you utilize  your WOW! Phone service and decide if turning  off call waiting is something you need to do.  Here’s a few things for you to consider:

  • Some people want to talk with their friends and families without having to worry about missing an important phone call because the line is in use while others would prefer not to be interrupted.  
  • Some people use one of their WOW! Phone lines as a dedicated fax line in a home office and want to turn off call waiting because it has the potential to  interfere with fax transmission and reception.
  • Some people work from home taking inbound calls and their companies require the call waiting feature to be disabled because it could interfere with call routing and tracking functions.

These are a few reasons why people would want to disable the call waiting feature and I’m sure there’s more.  If you can think of some more reasons that you’d like to share with us, please respond to this blog. Call waiting is not a customer activated feature, so if you want to disable it, you will need to call us and speak to one of our customer care representatives who will be happy to assist you.  Our toll free number is 1-866-496-9669.  We’ll be waiting for your call.

In Education posted February 19, 2010 at 7:00 am