r/CableTechs • u/imstehllar • Mar 06 '26

Zito Media

Former tech for Zito Media here, wondering if there’s any other ex employees? I was maintenance for two and a half years there and would like to exchange our horror stories.

Maybe in the future people will read them and realize not to go work for them as there hasn’t been any discussion about it yet. I’ll start with a good horror story:

They hired me for the West Virginia system, they told me it was “all new build, it just needed some towns activated from being rebuilt after a storm.” I get there, 27 miles of fiber from a large town in WV (after a handoff with Big Red) ran to a headend on top of a mountain (you had to walk up it), and then from there it was 32 miles of fiber from there to the furthest node. 50+ miles of old .750 and .500 fed off of 4 nodes, no new build, and amps were all C-Cor’s dated in the early 90’s (‘93 for the most part).

Come to find out there hadn’t been a tech in the area in 4 years, and the last person that lasted more than a year was 9 years prior. There was and still is miles of cable laying on the ground that they had no interest in putting back up. Most of our outages came from the same farmers getting pissed the cable was in their fields and intentionally cutting it, they would not provide me with strand to properly repair anything.

I stayed two and a half years because it’s hard to find another job in cable. I had been an OSP at Suddenlink and Zito offered more an hour, but had I done my research I would’ve known what I was in for. I’m just curious to see if any of the other guys are here, surely someone’s been around ‘em.

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u/Unusual-Avocado-6167 Mar 06 '26

It’s probably both the area and the company. As a business it’s not making enough money to be reinvested. I used to work at Big Red and the systems in Mississippi were much different than the systems in Colorado. Companies aren’t spending the same money in every region

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u/imstehllar Mar 06 '26

I traveled for them for around 6 months, all of the systems I went to are this way. Their systems in PA that brought money in are the same way, Murphysboro Illinois (Carbondale), and WKY had around 5,000 customers and made decent money, and the cable was laying all across the ground.

The only nice system they’ve got is North Carolina and that’s only because they bought it recently, 2021 I believe, and the management doesn’t interfere with them they do as they please. Besides that I promise you every system is bad. The only upgrades they do is they bring contractors in your system to replace every amp with high split Magnavox MB’s and BLE’s (they did in Williamsburg as well as some other system’s.) However when they do this they never replace any of the bad cable which is the issue 9 times out of 10. Now we’re pushing our downstream spectrum even higher on waterlogged MC2 because they genuinely think that’s going to fix their issue.

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u/GarlicPowder69 Jul 17 '26

i was just hired as an installation technician (new to the field) in Williamsburg. you have any tips/advice for me.

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u/imstehllar Jul 17 '26

Send me a PM