Senator Ben Ray Luján’s Outage Refund Protection Act, S. 4557, would require cable, satellite, phone, and broadband providers with more than 5,000 customers to credit bills automatically when service is out for four hours or more, at 1/30 of the monthly rate for each day that happens. The bill exempts maintenance outages announced in advance. Luján’s press release says the legislation is meant to ensure consumers are “fairly compensated for the time they are without the service they rely on,” and the formula measures that time in hours and days. For a customer with a deadline, the loss depends on which hours went missing, and the formula never asks.
Take a hypothetical three-person contractor on a $120-a-month plan, and assume the bill covers it and each outage is unplanned. Its bid for a county job is due in an online portal that closes at 2 p.m. Thursday and accepts nothing late. The line drops at 11 a.m. If it returns at 2:45 p.m., the outage ran three hours and 45 minutes, short of the bill’s four-hour trigger, and no credit is owed under this bill. If it returns at 3:15 p.m., the firm would be owed $4. An outage from midnight to 6 a.m. on a Sunday would also earn $4 and cost the firm nothing. In both Thursday cases the line comes back after the portal has closed.
The text names no payment to a customer beyond the credit and its refund on termination, and does not make the credit exclusive. Under Section 3(g), the section does not preempt state laws that impose more restrictive intrastate requirements. Whether the firm could recover more for the lost bid turns on law outside this bill. Even in the longer Thursday outage, the credit’s trigger is reached at 3 p.m., after the portal has closed.
I would settle the submission plan before Thursday, whether that means submitting early or arranging a backup connection. A cellular hotspot on a different carrier, tested on the machine that will submit, has a price the firm knows in advance. The firm can set that price beside the expected value of the bid and its own estimate of the odds that the line fails while the backup still works. I would keep the credit out of that arithmetic and treat it as a refund for time without service. Under the bill’s formula, it can be owed for a Sunday that cost nothing and withheld for the Thursday that cost the firm its chance at the job.