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Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

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Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#151

Post by nxcho »

reaperducer wrote: post #121
abhiminator wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a non-American, I find to hard to grasp how a country that places super high priority on access to choices and options can get stuck with just two major parties and just ONE ISP (in most places, that is).

>As a non-American, I find to hard to grasp how a country that places super high priority on access to choices and options can get stuck with just two major parties and just ONE ISP (in most places, that is). Distance. America has states and even counties larger than many countries. And even where there are lots of people, population density is typically less than most other nations. Distance is a killer in last-mile…

Sweden is about the same size as California but with about one third of its population (and about 2/3 of the population density of US), still it is in the top 10 internet access list in about every metric you can think of (together with for example Norway and Iceland, neither especially densely populated) so I don't think the density argument holds.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#152

Post by mcculley »

charleslmunger wrote: post #73
mcculley wrote: post #57

This is why it would be better to pay by bit consumed, like most do for electricity. This would encourage carriers to build more infrastructure. It would also create an economic incentive for the ever increasing number of Internet connected devices to be more conscientious of data usage. Of course, we can't have that in the oligopoly situation in the United States.

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.

It reflects value to me. I want my connection to be as fast as possible. If I pay a fixed monthly fee, the incentive to the ISP is to throttle my connection at some point. If they have no unit economics, why do some ISPs throttle and cap after hitting a maximum?

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#153

Post by walrus01 »

patejam wrote: post #150
walrus01 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best current info is as follows: There is a fiber cut somewhere between NYC and Chicago. At the same time there is also a fiber cut between Ashburn, VA, and locations in South Carolina. The cut is somewhere in NC. Copy and paste from Level3 notification system: "* CASCADED EXTERNAL NOTES 29-Jun-2018 15:13:37 GMT From CASE: 14815828 - Event Field Operations dispatched to the estimated failure location and upon arrival…

There are massively important fiber lines being hung from a utility pole?

It's more common than you think, a lot of long distance links between cities are a varied combination of aerial, direct buried trenched armored fiber, underground fiber in ducts.

There are also a lot of long-distance links carrying DWDM traffic that are >95% aerial, not on poles that can get hit by trucks, with singlemode fiber inside high voltage AC transmission lines (https://3ee2108sdg.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/cropped-20140...).

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#154

Post by makecheck »

zzzcpan wrote: post #128
makecheck wrote: post #16

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…

It's not really possible for a single ISP to get to the level of quality that has no hours at a time outages. For minutes per year outages level quality you need at least two ISPs independent from each other and not sharing infrastructure. Which means they won't even be available to consumers in the US and other countries, where internet access market is monopolized. I mean I can't imagine a law mandating ISPs to eff…

They are in the business of Internet service, whatever that means. If there are things legitimately beyond their control, then pricing and/or claims of service must reflect that.

Instead, we see many issues of their own making (monopolies and refusal to invest, mainly) that make it hard to sympathize.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#155

Post by drewr »

walrus01 wrote: post #141
onewhonknocks wrote: post #105

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.

I work for an ISP and have several times seen totally coincidental dual fiber cuts, in totally different places 150+ miles apart, within the same 8-12 hour period of time, not due to any malicious activity. Just bad luck and assholes crashing trucks into power lines, railroad bridges getting washed out in floods, etc.

Why is it not more trivial to auto-route around those kinds of events?

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#156

Post by tlrobinson »

cup-of-tea wrote: post #137
JonathonW wrote: post #82

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…

> They seem to be at least starting to route around it now Isn't IP supposed to do this automatically?

IP itself doesn’t, that’s BGP. I’m not sure what it’s limitations around large links going down are though.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#157

Post by cryoshon »

walrus01 wrote: post #141
onewhonknocks wrote: post #105

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.

I work for an ISP and have several times seen totally coincidental dual fiber cuts, in totally different places 150+ miles apart, within the same 8-12 hour period of time, not due to any malicious activity. Just bad luck and assholes crashing trucks into power lines, railroad bridges getting washed out in floods, etc.

given the scale of our fiber networks, i'd expect coincidences like this.

the more cynical side of me says that an intentionally crashed truck looks the same to outsiders as one that was crashed to cut the fiber line.

but i really don't think it's the case that there is foul play here today. this is where calculating p values comes in handy though.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#158

Post by GistNoesis »

I'm picturing plenty of bundled optical fiber cut in two. How big are these bundles ? How can they repair the optical fiber (i.e. how to reconnect each single fiber to its previous half ?) Do they have to reinstall a section of cable ?

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#159

Post by AngryData »

patejam wrote: post #150
walrus01 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Best current info is as follows: There is a fiber cut somewhere between NYC and Chicago. At the same time there is also a fiber cut between Ashburn, VA, and locations in South Carolina. The cut is somewhere in NC. Copy and paste from Level3 notification system: "* CASCADED EXTERNAL NOTES 29-Jun-2018 15:13:37 GMT From CASE: 14815828 - Event Field Operations dispatched to the estimated failure location and upon arrival…

There are massively important fiber lines being hung from a utility pole?

I do fiber runs and whenever possible it is strung up on poles. It is far faster and easier than doing underground cabling because there are no utilities or gas lines or what have you to possibly hit. More of the stuff put down 15 years ago was put underground but a lot of it now is just lashed around current telephone lines.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#160

Post by walrus01 »

drewr wrote: post #155
walrus01 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for an ISP and have several times seen totally coincidental dual fiber cuts, in totally different places 150+ miles apart, within the same 8-12 hour period of time, not due to any malicious activity. Just bad luck and assholes crashing trucks into power lines, railroad bridges getting washed out in floods, etc.

Why is it not more trivial to auto-route around those kinds of events?

In many cases BGP does its job just fine at layer 3. But budgetary constraints and financial reality for the cost of really huge interconnection mean that a cut may result in a 100 Gbps PNI peering session between two ISPs filling up and flat-topping its traffic chart (very, very bad) when the traffic re-routes. One example is that as a result of today's events there was apparently major packet loss and congestion between HE and Comcast in the NYC area.

Or when traffic re-routes, a major ISP will temporarily congest its own intra-AS city-to-city links on a few key paths, for their own router-to-router interfaces.

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