Mediacomm was having some bad equipment problems in Marshalltown or Des Moines a couple months ago. It was on a hand off to Sprint on some fiber shelf. It bit us twice, each on a Sunday, for most of the day. After the second episode, which apparently happened after scheduled maintenance, I am convinced the big boys decided to mess with a couple little guys. Sunday outages usually affect residential users, which are my bread and butter.
Unfortunately, I didn't have enough sense to have my upstream provider supply me with a map of exactly how the traffic was routed, and the outages affected my primary connection AND my backup. Seems both Dynamic Broadband and Mediacomm hand off to Sprint here in this part of Iowa. So, even my back-up as currently configured can be at risk. Needless to say, I have a winter project to engineer something going to the east from here. Matt, I hope they get it figured out for you guys soon. If you're anything like me, all hairs are already gray. Mike At 01:54 AM 12/1/2009, you wrote: >Some kind of combination of failure between Charter and Qwest has left >tens of thousands of people in Nebraska without Internet and has >disrupted the Internet and phone services for thousands more. Right >now, the outage is going on 12 hours and there is no ETA for repair in >sight. > >The word coming down is that the outage is on a Qwest fiber, but it >looks to me like both parties should be on the hot seat for not having >the ability to route around the problem. There was a four hour outage >on Charter a week ago that was caused by a fiber cut in Gothenburg, >Nebraska. >That one killed everything west of the cut, but it was small potatoes >compared to this one. Is this truly the level of performance that we >can expect from our major Internet backbone providers? It took me >about 10 seconds to re-route my traffic to a backup provider - you would >think that a couple of multimillion dollar companies would be able to >sort out a problem of this nature in a reasonable amount of time. The >small CLEC that I use for my backup connection had enough capacity to >route around the problem and was even able to lend me a little bit after >5pm when the traffic on their network (mostly businesses) dropped off. >It isn't rocket science to figure out how to route around an outage. > >Almost as frustrating is that there was NO news about the outages >anywhere except on the social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter). >One TV station in Hastings, NE put up a short story on their website, >but I got more news from the tweets and FB posts that people where >posting from their cell phones than I did from anywhere else. None of >the network outage sites have any news about this. > >Could this be a harbinger of things to come? I am feeling pretty >thankful right now that I have a choice in backbone providers and that I >kept a second one. Diversity is a good thing, and this is a great >example of why we need competition and multiple options for Internet. > >Matt Larsen >vistabeam.com > > > > > > >-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >WISPA Wants You! Join today! >http://signup.wispa.org/ >-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > >WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org > >Subscribe/Unsubscribe: >http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > >Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: wireless@wispa.org Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
