[SLL] Nationwide Internet: melting down?

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2007, Brian Lane wrote:
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>Tim Maher wrote:
>> 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.
>
>I'd suggest giving cable a try. I've been using it over here in Port
>Orchard for around 5 years now and there have been minor problems, but
>nothing as bad as you are describing with DSL. My theory is that since
>cable internet shared with cable TV users the response to outages is so
>overwhelming that it forces them to act quickly :)

I would be very uncomfortable with Comcast for any mission-critical service
as they did very poorly in last December's wind storm.  On Mercer Island,
the power was out for 7 days here, but our QWest phones and T1 service
never failed (nor did my 3kw Honda generator which kept all our systems up
and running).  Comcast service went down with the power, and wasn't
restored in many places for about a week after the power was back on.

I knew many people who were without Comcast cable for about two weeks.

That isn't to say I haven't had problems with QWest.  Our T1s service has
been with NWNexus->Winstar->Global Crossing->Eschelon over the years, but
the final mile (actually almost 5 miles) has been QWest.  There have been
at least two occassions when QWest had to reprovision the entire circuit
from their CO to us because of line and mid-span repeater failures.

We were down for over 29 hours last year when the T1 went down on a
Saturday night, coming back up on Monday morning.  When the circuit still
wasn't up on Sunday afternoon, I was told that they couldn't work on it at
night because it was dark and their technician was a woman so it was a
``safety'' problem.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
FAX:            (206) 232-9186  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820; (206) 236-1676

One man's brain plus one other will produce one half as many ideas as one
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		-- Anthony Chevins