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Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

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Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#111

Comcast's confirmed the fiber cut: https://twitter.com/comcastcares/status/1012767042158510080 > One of Comcast’s large backbone network partners had a fiber cut that we believe is also impacting other providers. It is currently affecting our business and residential internet, video and voice customers. We apologize & are working to get services restored as soon as possible They seem to be at least starting to route…

Sounds like it was 2 cuts, which likely means it was intentional IMHO: NY| Manhattan| Communication Failure | 30 Rockefeller Plaza (Comast)| Comcast is experiencing a National outage due to 2 fiber line cuts. One between NYC & Chicago, the second between Ashburn & South Carolina. customers urged NOT TO CALL 911, no ETA on a fix, police monitor Edit: source below. Thank you dfee.

Non Bitly link: https://twitter.com/joangralla/status/1012761031922409473?s=...

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#112
post #27

I use them at work and home (no choice). From a technical perspective, Comcast is usually rock-solid for me. Sure it's expensive, and an absolute joke that I have to call every year to keep the discounts and a TV plan that I don't use, but I'll give credit where they have actually done a good job. I'd much rather a stable service that's a bit of a pain on the billing side than a terrible service that has a nice websi…

Yes, everyone loves to complain about the cable company but in my experience Comcast's network, technicians, and support people are the best in the business. You could not pay me to use CenturyLink, for instance.

CenturyLink seems to have far fewer phone outages nowadays than they did e.g. three years ago. One time by some miracle I got someone on the phone who wasn't a "basic" CSR. He admitted that they knew why their outages lasted for hours. Whenever they had a fault that required a system-wide restart (!), they just rebooted everything at once. So there were millions of modems trying to talk to the RADIUS/DNS/etc. servers all at the same time. Which didn't work at all. I asked if anyone had considered a rolling reboot. "Yeah, that's what we've been telling them..."

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#113
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like it was 2 cuts, which likely means it was intentional IMHO: NY| Manhattan| Communication Failure | 30 Rockefeller Plaza (Comast)| Comcast is experiencing a National outage due to 2 fiber line cuts. One between NYC & Chicago, the second between Ashburn & South Carolina. customers urged NOT TO CALL 911, no ETA on a fix, police monitor Edit: source below. Thank you dfee.

Non Bitly link: https://twitter.com/joangralla/status/1012761031922409473?s=...

Thank you. Sorry I messed up the link.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that makes sense - bit consumed neither reflects the value of the service to the customer, nor the unit economics of the provider. You want a service level guarantee (99.9% available, with some extra wiggle room for peak hours and degradation. With electricity, you're paying for energy generation, plus grid maintenance. With internet, you're only paying for grid maintenance.

How about bid on a variable price per bit? Just like is done with bitcoin transactions. If you are sending an important file, in an important conference call, or are receiving an important download that you don't want to wait long for, then you choose to pay more to get faster and more reliable service, but if you are streaming a youtube or doing something in the background, then you select a lower price for moderate…

That sounds like a user-hostile, free market dystopia.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#117

Well, we all know they’ll learn to do better because of this: they’ll take all that money from monthly fees and make sure to improve quality of service! Right? Nope. They’ll probably raise prices if anything, and receive no ill effects as a company for basically failing to provide what they happily accept money for. (Buried somewhere in an “update” to Terms of Service, they probably pardon themselves from exactly thi…

Of course nothing will happen. Comcast is too good at lobbying and Internet still doesn't get treated with the same legal importance as other infrastructure like road, running water or even snail mail.

What do you suggest happen? We levy criminal charges against them because somebody/something severed important fiber connections?

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If what you're saying turns out to be true, it would be very disturbing. Disrupting your paying customer's access with unannounced 'tests' is a sure-fire way to torpedo your brand value and rating.

“Comcast” and “brand value” do not go together very well as it is.

This is true.

When your company name is so hated by the public that you have to re-brand your flagship product "Xfinity" to distance it from yourself, you know you're running a crappy company.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#119

Well, we all know they’ll learn to do better because of this: they’ll take all that money from monthly fees and make sure to improve quality of service! Right? Nope. They’ll probably raise prices if anything, and receive no ill effects as a company for basically failing to provide what they happily accept money for. (Buried somewhere in an “update” to Terms of Service, they probably pardon themselves from exactly thi…

Don't forget all those folks without home phone service and unable to make emergency calls.

The same thing happens when telephone service goes out because of a down power line. Nothing new here.
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