More than 5,200 Lehigh Acres households have been without Quantum Fiber internet since July 20, and the company is still telling them it will be back tomorrow

Money & World

The Editorial Team · August 3, 2026

Three bundles of fibre optic strands lit red against a black background, each fanning out from a bright white point of light. No text or signage is visible. A generic illustration, not a photograph of Lehigh Acres.

Photo: Connor Scott McManus / Pexels

What it changes

For the households inside this outage the loss is not entertainment, it is the things that quietly moved onto home broadband over the last decade. The two customers WINK put on the record describe a daughter unable to prepare for dual enrollment exams, a second child unable to submit summer coursework, interpreting work done over Zoom that cannot be done, and home security cameras and thermostats that have been offline for almost two weeks. One of them says other providers do not serve her area and that she depends on Wi-Fi calling because cell coverage is poor, which is the detail that turns an internet outage into a partial loss of telephone service as well. Lehigh Acres is the part of Lee County where that combination bites hardest, because it is large, it is low density, and single provider coverage is common across much of it. The part a reader should hold onto is the communication pattern rather than the fault itself. Both customers describe daily texts promising restoration that then does not arrive, and a call centre that repeats the text back to them. Outages happen and long ones happen after damage that takes time to find. What is being described here is a company that has kept setting a next day expectation for close to two weeks, which is what leaves a household unable to decide whether to keep waiting or to pay to move to another provider, assuming one serves the address. There is no filing to point at. Internet service outages carry no equivalent of the boil water notice that a Florida water utility must issue and then formally rescind, no state agency requires a public record of the start, the cause, or the restoration, and the outage map that carries the customer counts is not readable without a service address. That asymmetry is worth naming in a week when this site has been able to give the exact hour a Cape Coral water notice began and the exact hour it lifted, and can give neither for an outage affecting thousands of households a few miles away.

More than 5,200 Quantum Fiber customers in Lehigh Acres have been without internet service since Monday July 20, WINK News reported, in a story by Brinkley Hill first published on Friday and updated on Sunday morning.

The company outage map shows six separate addresses affected, WINK reported, with the largest covering more than 5,200 households and the smallest more than 100.

Two customers spoke to the outlet on the record. Maristela Newkirk said the outage has interrupted her daughters' schooling, with one preparing for dual enrollment while entering eleventh grade and another unable to submit work for a summer class. She said she does interpreting work over Zoom and relies on Wi-Fi calling because cell service at her address is unreliable.

"It'll be up by tonight. It'll be up by tomorrow morning. And here we are, 12 days later, still no internet whatsoever," Newkirk told WINK.

David Wojnicz said the company has been sending daily texts promising restoration, and that calling customer service produces the same information. He said the outage has taken down home security equipment as well.

"We all have Ring doorbell cameras. My whole house is covered with cameras for security. We have none of that anymore," Wojnicz told the outlet.

No public filing records this outage. Internet providers in Florida are under no obligation to publish the start, cause, or restoration time of a service failure, and the Quantum Fiber outage map that carries the household counts cannot be read without a service address. Three company status pages were tested on Sunday and each returned an error.

Quantum Fiber is the fibre brand formerly operated by Lumen and CenturyLink. Its website now carries an AT&T copyright notice.

Where we read it: Brinkley Hill at WINK News. Read their story.

The document: No public filing has been released.

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