[SLL] Nationwide Internet: melting down?

[Tim Maher]

Okay, my "Nationwide Internet" DSL service went out again today (at
4pm), and after listening to the "hold music" for an hour, I was given
the usual explanation -- everybody in "my area" is affected, and
they're working with Qwest to determine what's wrong.

I'm totally fed up with this crappy reliability, and ready to switch
to a more reliable DSL IP -- or maybe even to cable. When I posted a
similar message back in July, Ralph Sims reported that he uses Qwest
DSL, and had never had an outage. But IIRC he's in Shelton, so his
experience may not be relevant to what I'm seeing in Seattle (maybe
they ran a dedicated fiber optic cable right to his house? 8-} )

Question time:

1) Did any other Seattle DSL customers have an outage today (8/9)?
   If not, what ISP are you using?

2) What more reliable ISP would you recommend? (I'm easily satisfied --
   all I need is one (non-RBHL) static IP address, and permission to run
   some standard servers.

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On Tue, Jul 23, 2030 at 02:43:51PM -0700, Tim Maher wrote:
> I've been using Nationwide Internet for many years (since they
> acquired me from The River <- from oz.net), and service has generally
> been fairly reliable -- until this summer.
> 
> At 2pm today, my DSL service stopped working (lights still flash
> normally, but I can't successfully ping anything). The recording on
> the support line says "... problem in WA state ... working with our
> vendors to fix ..."
> 
> This typically means I'll be Internetless for at least 2 hours, at
> which time things will magically return to normal.
> 
> Same thing happened about 10 days ago, with the difference that the
> recording insinuated that Qwest might be to blame for that failure.
> 
> A month before that, another outage occurred.
> 
> Which leads me to my question:
> * Is this a statewide problem caused by a Qwest screwup,
>   which affects customers of all WA ISPs
>  OR,
>   +  is my ISP trying to tell me that they don't know what they're doing?
> 
> -Tim
> *--------------------------------------------------------------------*
> |  Tim Maher, PhD  (206) 781-UNIX   http://www.consultix-inc.com     |
> |  tim at ( Consultix-Inc, TeachMeLinux, or TeachMeUnix ) dot Com    |
> | CLASSES: 8/20: Shell;  8/23: UNIX/Linux Utils;  9/17: Minimal Perl |
> *-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+--*
> |  >> My "Minimal Perl for UNIX People" is an Amazon Best Seller! << |
> | # Download chapters, read reviews, and order at MinimalPerl.com #  |
> *--------------------------------------------------------------------*