18 months?
Talk about the 3 stooges cable company...
As a cable tech in the 80s I had a female customer complained for about 2 weeks her cable would go off every night when she went to watch dirty dancing on hbo..but it worked perfectly the next day when the tech showed up.
Turned out to be a loose seizure screw on the tap before the line extender amp that was loose enough that the contraction caused by the dropping temperature when the sunset backed the screw out which killed the 60 volts ac that powered her amp. It was aerial plant, front easement.
Being the only subscriber as active past that amp, it did not report as a street outage.
This was before two way in this cable sustem so locating such defects was trickier but possible if you spent the time with the customer and actually cared. I ended up giving her my beeper number to catch it.
Can't imagine an outage that large going on that long in this day and age unless it is some dated 300 mhz mom and pop ran outfit...or government/state run.
Eagler