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Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

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171–180 of 225 posts

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#171
post #44

> Customers were also taking to Twitter to reach out to the company about the possible outage. The company recommended that some users try checking the status center online, which would require an internet connection of some kind. Got to love you need internet to check the status of your internet :)

Comcast's oauth server was down for me, so I couldn't log in to my account like they recommended.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#172
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No this is just run of the mill shotty comcast service.

Shoddy

I chose to read that as "shoddy"+"shitty"="shotty". And a new word is coined! Although not to be confused with shotguns and (apparently) some sort of pipe.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#173
What's that NANOG .sig about 'always carry a piece of fiber, that way if you get lost just bury it and when the backhoe comes by to dig it up you can get directions back to civilization.'

"I always bring a length of fiber with me while backpacking. If I find myself lost, I just bury the fiber and a backhoe should be along shortly to dig it up." --Sean Lally

Similar, not the one I'm thinking of though.

ah-HA! We'll string it up on poles, no way the backhoes can get it up there!

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#174
post #165

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 ?

My dad used to do this for AT&T (mainly for train derailments if I remember right). As I understood it, he would cut/polish the ends of the glass and glue together. The process may have changed since then, it’s been about a decade.

What I don't get is how they match each individual fiber on the left with its right one, as I imagine there are probably thousands and individual fibers inside a bundle. When they installed the fiber at my home they had some laser to check the fiber correspondence. Is it just that, pick left illuminated by laser fiber, pick right illuminated by laser fiber, put in a glueing/fusing machine, and doing it n times (where n is huge)? Where do they get some slack to access the fiber bundled inside ? (Do they need to add a patch section and do the above work two times, or is there some neat trick ?)

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#175

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…

> They'll probably raise prices of anything

> There ought to be strict laws around long service outages, resulting in automatic multiple months of free service, etc. as a deterrent for allowing things to just collapse for hours at a time.

FYI, that means even higher prices...

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#176
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Ah, makes sense, you still need the ability to handle the rerouted traffic.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#178

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.

> customers urged NOT TO CALL 911 Do people really do this? I can't even comprehend this.

People call search and rescue for blisters too.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#179
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…

I also use Comcast at home & work. In my experience, my home service has been more reliable than work. My office is in the northern Chicago Suburbs, my home is in the western Chicago Suburbs. I've literally had days when I've had to leave the office to work from home, because, at least from home, I could still VPN into our data centers in NY/NJ from home, but no access from our office.

Re: Massive Comcast Outage Hits the US

#180

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.

> customers urged NOT TO CALL 911 Do people really do this? I can't even comprehend this.

I had to read that a couple times to make sure I wasn't missing something.

Wow. It's sad that has to be said. Do people not get fined for abusing 911 like that?

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