A broken router in Orange County, Calif., has interrupted digital phone service for Oceanic Time Warner Cable customers statewide.

The company didn't know yesterday afternoon how many of its 65,000 digital phone subscribers were affected and the severity of the problem in the islands, but said intermittent phone service started about a week ago in California.

“;It's the kind of problem that they haven't been able to put their fingers on because it's intermittent, which is why they haven't been able to easily fix it,”; said Alan Pollock, vice president of marketing. “;To my knowledge, it's the first time we've had a problem that we weren't able to resolve immediately. It's escalated up to our senior management, so they're using all their resources to get this resolved as quickly as possible.”;

Phone service is down anywhere from one minute to 20 minutes at a time.

A power failure in Orange County disrupted digital phone service for more than 12 hours about a month ago for all of Oceanic's Hawaii customers. At the time, Oceanic said it would offer refunds to affected customers, but will not this time around.

“;It would be an administrative nightmare to figure out how many people were affected and refund someone that is out for two minutes - we simply as a business can't,”; Pollock said. “;What we're trying to do is get this problem fixed so it doesn't happen again. It's clearly something that shouldn't have happened.”;