On Thu, 7 Sep 2006, Andrew Jorgensen wrote: > Just out of curiosity: Have you bothered to complain to the provider?
The worst of all the outages (8 hours) was definitely a UTOPIA equipment problem; I knew this to be the case because the "fiber link" LED on my "multiservice gateway" (UTOPIA fiber terminator box) was extinguished. When I called Xmission to see if they could find out anything about the outage and provide a guesstimate on the expected repair time, the very helpful Xmission tech confirmed that UTOPIA had a problem and shared my dismay at the apparent unreliability of the UTOPIA fiber system. The tech was sympathetic and said they (xmission) had been seeing "a lot" (whatever that means) of UTOPIA outage problems. That didn't exactly inspire confidence. :-) For what it's worth, I've not seen another "fiber down" problem like that. The other outages that my line has suffered have been for less than an hour at a time--mostly less than 10 minutes at a time, and in each case the fiber link was OK but I could not ping the upstream IP gateway at Xmission. Aside from Xmission's regularly-scheduled maintenance windows (which they are very good about notifying customers of in advance), I'm guessing these relatively frequent but short-lived outages are probably due to reconfigurations or maintenance (reboot therapy?) in UTOPIA's equipment--but I'll probably never know. When you call a service provider to ask about an outage that resolves itself after ten minutes, their answer always seems to be "well, it's working now". Chris /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
