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East Coast Internet Outage

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141–150 of 265 posts

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#141

When houses are created there are building codes to adhere to. For example, when there is a water pipe behind the walls a plumber (a good one) would also put a plate in front of it. In this way, once the walls are in place, drilling away into the wall, or nailing, would hit the metal plate, thus provides some safety mechanism. As another example, underground, in public areas are markings (or at least procedures) to i…

The vast majority of fiber optic cuts are someone digging through the cable underground.

You can't realistically prevent this with additional armoring, because it's quite a different failure to someone drilling in the wrong place - the forces are a lot higher, or heavy machinery is involved etc. (see also: the rate at which workers go through water mains in footpaths).

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#142

When houses are created there are building codes to adhere to. For example, when there is a water pipe behind the walls a plumber (a good one) would also put a plate in front of it. In this way, once the walls are in place, drilling away into the wall, or nailing, would hit the metal plate, thus provides some safety mechanism. As another example, underground, in public areas are markings (or at least procedures) to i…

Scale: wrapping all fiber optic cables in a protective metal sheath would be cost prohibitive. Whereas adding a metal sheet to prevent a house from flooding or someone from getting electrocuted makes sense.

One idea, borrowed from some chainsaw safety pants, would be to wrap the cable in a fiber web sheath that tangles in whatever cutting equipment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5VSivQe760

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen Comcast offer fiber, except to businesses at astronomical costs. I can't even find it on their website. Do they advertise upload bandwidth for their fiber?

They offer a 2Gibps fiber optic plan in certain locations for ~299$/month. https://todayamerican.medium.com/the-definitive-guide-on-how...

This section is an amazing indictment of the company that tens of millions of Americans have to deal with to get access to the internet.

>The Important Part Because so many people had this question, and I finally talked to someone at Comcast who knew what Gigabit Pro actually is, here is how to get in touch with them:

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#144
post #95

Too much is failing from single point outages. The FCC may have to establish standards to prevent over-centralization. In the entire history of the Bell System, no electromechanical central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason than a natural disaster or, one occasion, a major file. That record has not been maintained in the Internet era.

>The FCC may have to establish standards to prevent over-centralization. Bwahahahahaha. Sorry, but that's like expecting the FCC to do something that would benefit US citizens vs US corporations. I think we've seen that's just not something they are interested in doing. Maybe a new administration will put as the head of the FCC someone that is "good of citizens" minded and uses a normal size coffee cup, but I'm not h…

To be fair it's slightly more likely with Ajit Pai out.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#145
post #95

Too much is failing from single point outages. The FCC may have to establish standards to prevent over-centralization. In the entire history of the Bell System, no electromechanical central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason than a natural disaster or, one occasion, a major file. That record has not been maintained in the Internet era.

The Bell System's job was to operate a nationwide telephone system for voice, not high-speed data. Even then, you only had one path to the telephone CO and only one CO it could go to. Outages were rare because voice-grade wire is cheap and all the complexity is handled by the CO.

Also, while my Internet may have outages from time to time, I can't recall the last time I couldn't use my cell phone other than being in a bad signal area. For voice, cellular is definitely the way to go as capacity is easily added by adding new towers; not something easy to do with landlines.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FIOS is WAY better, they will fix their broken cable. I get (so far unlimited) 30gb up/down for $40/mo but it typically runs closer to 60 down 70 up. Fiber optic is baller. Though I do feel like they throttle me (web browsing becomes slow) if I am watching a streaming video service or mining crypto without a VPN on, could be an illusion but it always tends to clear up as soon as I activate the VPN.

60-70 gigabits per second for $40/month? Guessing you mean megabits. Not worth being packet inspected. 1gbit on comcast seems to give 42 mbps upload, was 50 a few months ago. ~$80/mo edit: hitting 48-50 mbps again today, sweet

Comcast "gigabit" is a lie.

I reliably get 900mb down and 900mb up with Verizon in DC.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve got Comcast 2 gig fiber and Verizon 1 fig fiber to my house, plus 1 gig cable. I live 10 minutes from horse farms in MD. (The horse farms also have fiber.)

I've never seen Comcast offer fiber, except to businesses at astronomical costs. I can't even find it on their website. Do they advertise upload bandwidth for their fiber?

https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/requirements-to-run...

It’s actually 3g up and down. It’s 10 gig Metro-E into a Juniper switch, with a 1g port and 10g port throttled to 2g.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#148
post #32

Honestly, at this point I've found HN to be the best "Status Page" for this sort of thing. I came here first when I found issues and fiddling around with my custom DNS lookup hierarchy didn't help. FiOS customer in DC Metro.

Also checking /r/sysadmin and sorting by new

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#149
post #95

Too much is failing from single point outages. The FCC may have to establish standards to prevent over-centralization. In the entire history of the Bell System, no electromechanical central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason than a natural disaster or, one occasion, a major file. That record has not been maintained in the Internet era.

The Bell System's job was to operate a nationwide telephone system for voice, not high-speed data. Even then, you only had one path to the telephone CO and only one CO it could go to. Outages were rare because voice-grade wire is cheap and all the complexity is handled by the CO. Also, while my Internet may have outages from time to time, I can't recall the last time I couldn't use my cell phone other than being in a…

What do you mean by saying the wire is cheap? Obviously you can’t send much high frequency data down the wire but each wire could only be used for one call at a time for much of the company’s history, so more wires were needed. What effect does that have on the cost? And surely the complexity is still in the CO with the internet, or am I missing something?

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#150
post #95

Too much is failing from single point outages. The FCC may have to establish standards to prevent over-centralization. In the entire history of the Bell System, no electromechanical central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason than a natural disaster or, one occasion, a major file. That record has not been maintained in the Internet era.

>no electromechanical central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason than a natural disaster or, one occasion, a major file

Are these systems even comparable? Today /= yesterday phone service....

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