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East Coast Internet Outage

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171–180 of 265 posts

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s awesome! How much is that, if you don’t mind sharing? I wish they had it in more places.

It’s expensive, $300/month. I try to justify it to myself by noting it’s on their business Metro-E network so it’s completely reliable and has amazing support. Also an entire /48 of static IPv6. It was $150/month for the first two years, which was much more palatable.

Their model is expensive because they don’t wire while neighborhoods. For me they had to run fiber a quarter mile, down my street, and trench under my driveway. I imagine all these one-offs make the per house investment quite high.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#172

Yes, large carriers can't do much when the backhoe strikes.. it happens.. they'll fix it.. and we'll all go on with our lives..

I thought the whole point of the internet and protocols like TCP/IP is that it's supposed to be fault tolerant and traffic is supposed to automatically re-route. Seems kind of weird how a single cable being cut can cause half the country to lose internet...

TCP doesn't know anything about route failure or rerouting. All it does is handle a few dropped or reordered packets here and there.

In principle, you can have systems that very quickly route around damage like this, but in practice it happens so rarely that it's not worth it for consumer ISPs. I think it should exist, but the ISP space is so burdened with red tape that the only way anyone could compete with it was literally to start a rocket ship company and launch a bunch of satellites.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I bought a home, I limited my searches to ones that had symmetric fiber connections.

Had to make this after seeing your post. https://i.imgflip.com/4vesal.jpg

haha I've been dreaming about a 10GB LAN setup; getting that on WAN would be awesome. I'd immediately establish elaborate multi-site NAS systems.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#174

Yes, large carriers can't do much when the backhoe strikes.. it happens.. they'll fix it.. and we'll all go on with our lives..

I thought the whole point of the internet and protocols like TCP/IP is that it's supposed to be fault tolerant and traffic is supposed to automatically re-route. Seems kind of weird how a single cable being cut can cause half the country to lose internet...

The ability for the internet to reroute after N path failures is there but someone has to pay for N paths worth of unused network to be ready for it. Most would rather just pay low cost and utilize all the bandwidth that can get them 364/365 days a year. For others (usually businesses) there are more expensive options.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast upload is a farce. They don't bother stating it anywhere, I presume because they modify it as needed to satisfy their needs for providing TV channels or their "burst" download speeds.

its 3/5/10/35mbit up, but consistent. 35 is the docsis limit on their gigabit cable offering

Which version of docsis is this? 2.0 from 2002?

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the whole point of the internet and protocols like TCP/IP is that it's supposed to be fault tolerant and traffic is supposed to automatically re-route. Seems kind of weird how a single cable being cut can cause half the country to lose internet...

TCP doesn't know anything about route failure or rerouting. All it does is handle a few dropped or reordered packets here and there. In principle, you can have systems that very quickly route around damage like this, but in practice it happens so rarely that it's not worth it for consumer ISPs. I think it should exist, but the ISP space is so burdened with red tape that the only way anyone could compete with it was l…

Starting an ISP isn't all THAT hard.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/jared...

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#177
No problems in Jersey City all day. Bleeping Computer article cites someone as saying it's a specific AS that's affected. JC routes through an AS in Newark, NJ and not NYC so, for me at least, there hasn't been an outage.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s awesome! How much is that, if you don’t mind sharing? I wish they had it in more places.

It’s expensive, $300/month. I try to justify it to myself by noting it’s on their business Metro-E network so it’s completely reliable and has amazing support. Also an entire /48 of static IPv6. It was $150/month for the first two years, which was much more palatable. Their model is expensive because they don’t wire while neighborhoods. For me they had to run fiber a quarter mile, down my street, and trench under my…

That's not bad, I'd be willing to pay that and even more. I was simply unable to contact anyone at Comcast who was willing to entertain running fiber to a home. So I simply had to buy a home that had an option other than Comcast.

In another instance, I needed symmetric fiber at one of my businesses. I contacted Comcast, the business/commercial departments multiple times, got numerous peoples' names, left voice and email messages left and right and got nowhere after weeks. I ended up contacting a different ISP, signed up with them, and then on the install date, Comcast showed up to install the fiber modem (who were, of course, reselling it to the ISP I contracted with). I ended up paying the other ISP $1,700 per month.

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast "gigabit" is a lie. I reliably get 900mb down and 900mb up with Verizon in DC.

The download isn't a lie and it's what they advertise. I was getting 800mbps before I updated my home router from a 2014 model to a 2020 one, now I hit 950-960. I wish the upload was symmetric, but I understand that's not always possible on copper, getting about 50 now. Not bad for a ~50-year-old apartment.

The problem isn't with copper, it's with the cost of building out amplifiers. It's a lot more cost effective to amplify downstream than upstream, especially when most use cases are heavily asymmetric.

(I'd expect that only in the past year or so has upstream been a lot more heavily utilized, what with massively increased work-from-home due to the pandemic. Before then, the primary stressors of the network were things like streaming 4k60 video.

And I'll be very surprised if any ISPs thought torrent uploads to be a use case worth optimizing for.)

Re: East Coast Internet Outage

#180
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, for clarity, it's never one fiber line being cut. It's a big massive bundle of fiber carrying different circuits for different carriers different places that were run in the same trench and all got cut at once. Then they get to dig it out better and someone gets to get down in the hole and figure out which piece of fiber needs to be spliced to which other one. Because of DWDM, some of those individual fibers may…

And when it's a large bundle cut, it's going to take a bit before service is restored. I have been told that a highly skilled tech can splice a single strand in a matter of minutes. Looking it up, I find figures of an average of 30 minutes per joint for 4-strand bundles, and slowing down from there. So if you have a 144-strand bundle to repair, or multiple 144-strand bundles, it's going to take several hours to effec…

Would it maybe be an idea to, going forward, color the cables individually before putting them into the ground?
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