All of Cox Communications’ South Coast Internet customers experienced a “planned outage” for several hours late Tuesday and Wednesday, but a company spokesman said there shouldn’t be a need for such a long outage to happen again.

David Edelman, Cox’s vice president for public affairs, said the company did not feel the need to give advance warning to its customers about the outage because the work was done during its “maintenance window,” which is generally from midnight to 6 a.m. In fact, Cox’s service went down just after 11 p.m. Tuesday and, as late as 6 p.m. Wednesday, Noozhawk was receiving reports from Cox customers of continued outages.

Edelman said the aim of the work was to increase bandwidth and, ultimately, Internet speed. He added that all customers should be able to notice the difference by sometime in December.

Edelman said Wednesday’s upgrade shut off Internet service to all of Cox’s 47,000 customers from Carpinteria to Goleta. He said the service went down for everyone simultaneously, but was turned back on gradually.

He said most people were back up and running by 5 a.m., with some exceptions. For instance, Edelman said there were pockets of customers in Montecito and Carpinteria who remained offline after 5 a.m., as well as other customers scattered throughout the South Coast. He said he did not know how many customers remained offline after 5 a.m.

Edelman said the scope of Wednesday morning’s upgrade was rare.

“This was really a once-in-a-lifetime switchover that we needed to do,” he said. “This is a one-shot deal.”

He added that on Wednesday, Cox responded to numerous complaints, and occasionally had to send service workers to people’s homes and offices to get their computers back online.