Multi-State AT&T U-Verse Outage Enters Third Day 202
SonicSpike writes "AT&T U-verse customers are reporting this morning that an outage that began Monday and is affecting at least 15 states is still not resolved. Some customers were told this morning that the problem will not be fixed for at least 24 hours."
Somewhere out there (Score:3, Funny)
...is a U-verse subscriber who's freaking out because he can't let his friends know how shitty the service was at McDonalds this morning. Right now he's thinking "They'll never get to hear me say 'Forget the McMuffin, how about some McPoliteness?'"
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About U-verse subscribers or McDonalds customers?
This is surprising (Score:5, Funny)
After all, AT&T charges some of the highest rates for internet access in the world, and it's very slow. I assumed that this was because all the money was going into rock solid reliability instead of speed. Right? Right?
Re:This is surprising (Score:5, Funny)
Reliable and speed... ...in the CEO's latest Italian car.
Re:This is surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously you have never owned an Italian car. Speed in some models, but never reliability. Ever.
Re:This is surprising (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously the CEO is using reliability via redundancy. If he has 10 fast Italian cars, he's got a decent chance that at least one works at any given time.
Re:This is surprising (Score:4, Funny)
I suspect that the CEO lost his N+2 italian car redundency, and placed his best techs on solving the problem, rather than maintaining the u-verse service.
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Re:This is surprising (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously the CEO is using reliability via redundancy. If he has 10 fast Italian cars, he's got a decent chance that at least one works at any given time.
Redundant Array of Expensive Ferrari's?
How would that work if it broke down whilst he was driving? will he need to tow the other 9 Ferrari's to ensure that he has the ability to failover at any time?
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Fix It Again, Tony!
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FIAT:
Fix It Again Toy
Obviously someone doesn't look at the real reliability of Italian made vehicles... From FIAT to Ferrari... they're all built like crap.
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Reliable and speed... ...in the CEO's latest Italian car.
I guess you've never driven a FIAT, neither fast nor reliable.
I guess that's a good analogy for AT&T.
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Really? It doesn't seem a bad deal to me for internet-only ISP. What's cheaper and faster?
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Right now, for the customers in those 15 states, my 300 baud modem connected to AOL is faster and cheaper.
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Chances are that these people don't have phone service either. AT&T likes to push it's "one big bundle". So these people probably don't have anything to connect a serial modem to.
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I got an ad today from them, they offered me 3 meg service for the same price I pay comcast for 6 meg service. The only reason why I switched from ATT is my 3 meg service constantly ran at 768k to 1.5Mb
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I can't really do comcast without some rewiring or going wifi, and I know many more people who complain about them then anything else (as in "I'd drop them but they're bundled with my cable").
They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up fo (Score:2)
They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up for this.
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yes they should. lets just enable it on everyones bill and make the first month free.
turn an outage into a marketing strategy.
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I use cable for my business internet account....but picked UVerse awhile back in that compared to cable and both satellite packages with full house DVR, they were the cheapest and had by far the most HD channels for the buck.
That was a couple years ago, I guess I should shop around again to see what's out there, but so far, service and uptime has been quite good!! Even after hurricane Issac, when I ge
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Indeed. We had a quite bad storm back in June and were without power for a week (and we were lucky to get it back so soon), but U-Verse never skipped a beat. They rolled in a swarm of generators to keep their VRAD boxes going.
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yes they should. lets just enable it on everyones bill and make the first month free.
turn an outage into a marketing strategy.
That's what DirecTV does. They give you everything but fails to tell you that you need to cancel the extras. They also tell you that unless you give them a credit card to bill directly (pun intended) they will charge you more. So unless you are aware and paying attention, they screw you out of a month or two of high dollar TV. And you need to really pay attention. Come football season you'll suddenly be charged another $60.00 / month for football coverage you didn't order. It's all a scam. There isn't an ho
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Actually, according to Miriam-Webster [merriam-webster.com], either attorneys general OR attorney generals is the acceptable plurality.
The noun can be considered both words together in this case.
Re:They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up (Score:5, Interesting)
Does AT&T even offer an SLA for it's residential customers?
Re:They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up (Score:4, Interesting)
I imagine there isn't a single carrier that offers an SLA for residential customers.
Become a business customer, however, and they'll offer an SLA - over those very same cables delivering your formerly-residential account (I know, I used to have Road Runner Business Class with the same frequent outages).
In other words, you get what you pay for. Just like you can buy a First Class ticket with all the amenities of the 'glory days' of flying; every industry is embracing (or exploring) tiers of service.
Re:They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up (Score:4, Interesting)
years ago (10+) when you signed up for Business Class Road Runner they had a policy that you couldn't share a node (meaning that they couldn't just bill you different but it required a dedicated run). So when i moved into a new house i signed up for Business Class with no long term contract (yes it was expensive that way) but after they installed it and ran it for a month i canceled and then switched to residential. They are lazy and din't move me off the dedicated node.. so for 8 years i had residential service with business level of service.
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I'm wondering how they can get away with that kind of an outage for the voice service. As in, you know, not even being able to dial 911?
They built out the node about 500 feet from my house two years before even starting to offer U-verse. At that range, VDSL2+ can reach 50Mb/sec or more. I thought that could be nice. Once I saw that they seemed to care more about selling cable TV (I watch plenty with an antenna these days) and voice service (I'll stick with my reliable POTS line, TYVM), I was less intereste
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The only time I thought I needed new CPE gear with U-Verse, I had a technician at my house within a couple of hours with a new box. Late. On a Saturday.
And then it turned out to be a cabling issue a few hundred feet out, which he fixed.
Having spare gear on-hand is nice and all, but if it means having 6Mbit DSL instead of 12 or 18Mbit VDSL, I'll take the latter.
And if it breaks for some reason, I can always tether my phone, or use "Linksys" or "NETGEAR" in the interim.
*shrug*
Re:They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up (Score:5, Informative)
We had an odd problem with the U-Verse phone service where it would not display the Caller ID for my MIL.
My wife won't answer the phone if she can't see the Caller ID, so if it says "UNAVAILABLE" she will let it ring.
I tried to get them to figure out what was wrong and after about 2 hours they figured it out.
The rep was very apologetic and offered to "make it up" to us because we were so "understanding"
He offered 1 month of Free HBO
I asked him what was our obligation after that free month.
He paused.
I asked him if we would then get billed for the second month if we didn't cancel.
"Well, yes" was his reply
I asked him if there was ANY other way he was authorized to "make it up" to us.
He told me there was nothing else.
Re:They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up (Score:4, Interesting)
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Ah yes. tigerdirect.com is notorious for this. Call up, complain, get it fixed, then "We would like to offer you a free copy of x", which is actually a subscription auto-billed to your credit card. They will only take a hang up as an affirmative no. I started just paying the few bucks for newegg.com
This is why you dont accept free shit instead of having them fix your problem.
I used to have a housemate who had a constant problem with the handset Optus (Australian Telco) sold to her. She was on Pre-Paid (Pay As You Go) so she paid for the handset outright. Every month she'd ring up and complain, every month they'd offer her $10 credit to get her off the phone and every month I'd ask "but did they fix your problem". She didn't get it and continued to get constant call disconnections.
Companies offer
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I used to have a housemate who had a constant problem with the handset Optus (Australian Telco) sold to her. She was on Pre-Paid (Pay As You Go) so she paid for the handset outright. Every month she'd ring up and complain, every month they'd offer her $10 credit to get her off the phone and every month I'd ask "but did they fix your problem". She didn't get it and continued to get constant call disconnections.
Companies offer free shit because it's easier than fixing the problem. When you take the free shit, you give them a free pass not to fix the problem.
The other side of the coin is that there are plenty of people who call to complain, but don't really want the "issue" fixed, because they don't actually consider it to be all that serious of a problem. They'd rather just use it as leverage to get free shit.
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The other side of the coin is that there are plenty of people who call to complain, but don't really want the "issue" fixed, because they don't actually consider it to be all that serious of a problem. They'd rather just use it as leverage to get free shit.
Sounds like a win-win for the companies.
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They forgot (Score:4, Funny)
Someone forgot to feed the hamster.
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Hamster... what are you smoking?
It's obviously too many trucks backing up the inter-pipes.
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You would think they would treat their only technician better.
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You clearly have no idea what you're talking about, hamsters cost money! They prefer demented homeless people these days so they can chuck them out for new ones when they start wanting food.
Me Verse (Score:4, Funny)
Mine is working fine. Sucks to be y 998kjhkh CARRIER LOST
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Nah, you got 'carrier lost' because your mom tried dialing the upstairs phone.
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U-Verse uses dial-up? ;)
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It used to be fun to type this in messages:
+++ATH0
Also known as, "How to find out who's using a crappy terminal emulator on your BBS."
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being offered $20 for my inconvenience (Score:2, Informative)
My outage in Raleigh, NC is now since 3am Tuesday, going on 36+ hours.
Did receive an automated phone call telling me that my service was restored, but that proved to be incorrect.
After 30min wait on hold, I was offered a $20 credit on my account (once service was restored) for my inconvenience.
It's a shame that the area is a duopoly - TWC isn't high on my trust list after they had a multi day outage around Christmas 2012
It worked better with relays (Score:5, Interesting)
In the entire history of the Bell System, no electromechanical central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. Not because the components were reliable, but because the architecture was. If you design high-reliability systems, you should understand the architecture of Number 5 Crossbar. [etler.com]
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To be fair, a modern IP network is more complicated than a crosspoint matrix.
Re:It worked better with relays (Score:5, Informative)
You've got some real rose-colored glasses there. I remember what else came along with that monopoly reliability:
-Phones, which you had to rent for decades, wired directly to the wall with no connectors. (That made painting a room into a constant phone shuffle.)
-Rules against hooking anything but rented telco equipment to the system.
-Astronomical per-minute costs to dial up grandma in the next state.
-Switches that were frequently overloaded by too much traffic (fast busy signal). Not technically "down", but frequently unuseable anyway.
-Zero calling features.
If the AT&T monopoly were still in place, we'd probably never have gotten internet access at all. Instead, we'd be probably all be stuck using clunky telco-owned terminals like the French Minitel system.
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Of course, you could get around those astronomical per-minute costs using nothing more than a whistle from a box of Cap'n Crunch [wikipedia.org]. But doing so could be fairly risky. :)
But yeah, anyone who thinks AT&T used to be a benevolent monopoly really needs to see the movie The President's Analyst [imdb.com] with James Coburn. Yes, that was an over-the-top parody, but man did it ring true* at the time!
* Pun intended.
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That is quite the red herring there. Did the poster say we should restore the AT&T monopoly? No. What he said (in so many words) is that the systems were engineered to such high standards that they never went down.
The suggestion that we would have to return to monopoly pricing in order for Internet access providers to give reliable service is preposterous. It takes some simple engineering is all. Which the current folks at AT&T (formerly Southeastern Bell) are apparently either incapable of or ar
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No, he said that the government breaking up the monopoly was "criminal", because breaking them up is the sole reason we can't match those vaunted uptime figures (which, as I pointed out, didn't necessarily mean that I could actually put a call through). Never mind the fact that modern communications technology is many orders of magnitude more complex and carries millions of times more information than an old-fashioned telephone crossbar switch. "Simple Engineering" fix, my ass.
The only logical conclusion we
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No, he said that the government breaking up the monopoly was "criminal"
I guess that is why one should quote a line or two of the comment he or she is responding to. The one you were actually responding to was hidden.
And when I say "simple engineering", I mean standard engineering practice. No one in his right mind designs a mission critical system for tens of thousands of people without full redundancy and usually automatic failover as well. A system that size that goes down for more than five minutes is
Re:It worked better with relays (Score:4, Interesting)
I see you're not a geezer, son. It's obvious all you know about the AT&T monopoly is what you read and nothing more. When they broke up Ma Bell, there were only landlines. Not even answering machines. Service was $12.00 a month for local calls only, back when gasoline was thirty cents a gallon and a burger, fries, and coke at McDonalds was forty seven cents. That equates to over $120 a month in today's money, for local phone calls only. And you had to rent the phone from them. And long distance was incredibly expensive. You might want to check out Lilly Tomlin's "Ernestine" on YouTube, it was funny because it was true.
Bell Labs never went away [wikipedia.org]. There are many replacements for Western Electric. We lost nothing and gained much. There was absolutely no downside whatever from AT&T's breakup. There is no upside to any monopoly, from a customer's point of view.
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No, no, just wait, the right will claim that it is a conspiracy by the left to create a socialist government run fibre to the home internet by demonstrating the incompetence of corporations when it comes to running critical infrastructure. Heaven forbid that America should resort to an Australian style communistic roll out.
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Well the breakup happened in 1987. There were plenty of answering machines back then. Some of us even had voice modems capable of turning your PC into a digital answering machine by then. But yes, I remember when the FCC finally stepped in and told the bells that they HAD to allow third party products to be able to connect to the phone system. Also, not having to rent/buy phones directly from them was a huge change.
Although, yes, I remember the "Call Packs" for cheap local calls. I also remember when t
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I have pondered this many times over the years. If it weren't for the breakup, we wouldn't have the Internet as we know it, either. We would be cruising along on our 1.5Mb/s PRI ISDN lines by now, for only $100/month plus distance changes.
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That being said, the 5ESS is a marvel of reliability.
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The problem wasn't the breakup of Bell. The problem was allowing it to re-aggregate itself, then allowing it to swallow up a major wireless company, multiplied by state legislatures eager to be the new monolith's favorite bitch and show their loyalty by abolishing most of the laws that forced them to be as good as you remember. The AT&T of today isn't the AT&T of 25 years ago. It's not even the BellSouth of 10 years ago.
The company we now know as AT&T has been caught red-handed, in state after s
INFORMATION (Score:5, Informative)
--- anonymous uverse tech
This is whats going on, any new gateway or exisiting gateway that is restarted will not be able to obtain service. The DHCP servers are overloaded and over capacity, CMS has disabled their northbound API so no provisioning can get thru in order to lessen the load.
Its not affecting everyone in the affected areas, and as a precaution NO ONE should attempt to powercycle or reset their gateway for any reason.
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as a precaution NO ONE should attempt to powercycle or reset their gateway for any reason.
Which is fine until your existing lease expires at which point you're SOL (like me). I've also heard that they're trying to reduce load by dropping MTU sizes which is preventing things like Netflix and XBox Live from working for people who actually still have connections. Of course that's just making things even worse from a customer service perspective. Any clues on what the triggering event was?
DHCP lease file blown away? (Score:2)
It sounds like someone blew away their DHCP lease file by mistake...so DHCP is assigning addresses that are already in use. Was there an upgrade over the weekend?
If that's the case, the only way to get around it is to query all the DSLAMs and rebuild the current lease file by hand.
Sucks to be them.
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Well, you're talking about something else.
A DHCP server generally keeps track of the leases that it sends out, and that file tends to be on-disk.
Ahe DHCP server can also be configured to check to see if the address is in use before assigning it...usually via a ping, arp, etc. That's just as likely to be turned off, because it's expensive and sort of redundant.
So...if that file is blown away during an upgrade, well, the DHCP server knows its range, and it'll just start assigning addresses.
A DHCP server upgra
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That's what happens when you let the bean counters determine the 'appropriate' system load. Add in the 'enterprise' habit of wanting central control when it's actually easier to distribute services and you get debacles like this.
Comcast (Score:2)
I never thought in a million years that I'd say I love Comcast, but I do.
My business class connection through them has been rock solid without major issues for over two years. Other than lightning frying the modem once but they were out within hours with a replacement.
AT&T U-Verse can go pound sand as far as I'm concerned.
Well there's the problem: (Score:2)
all from a single fiber optic cable
They obviously need a 2nd fiber optic cable, now
AT&T U-Verse has always been unreliable (Score:2)
I switched to U-Verse when they had a switch-discount program, but only for about a month. The problem was that nothing worked.
I actually wrote a program to track when I was connected. In a 3 day period, I had around 200 outages, each requiring between 3-5 minutes before the connection was regained. I literally could not use it to work from home - the time required to perform the VPN connection, get back to the machine I needed to use, and get back to work was just barely shorter than the average uptime.
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U-verse over 3k (possibly shorter if it's old copper) wire feet is generally a bad idea no matter what they tell you. My U-verse has worked flawlessly, but I'm only 1.2k wire feet away. There's only so much you can do with old copper pairs.
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I've been told by techs that U-verse needs a homerun to the modem and if you have any daisy-chained/star configuration it is asking for trouble. The other is a twisted pair--no four-strand or ribbon wiring--is highly recommended to get a good signal.
Comment removed (Score:3)
The two happiest days... (Score:2)
The two happiest days of a uverse user:
2nd happiest: the day they get it installed.
happiest: the day they get real cable.
I had uverse service for 10 days -- 9 days too long. Utter crap. The TV would not stay working, and when it did, the dolby digital would spuriously drop out. Internet? Even worse. crazy amounts of jitter -- when it worked -- which was not that often.
AT&T was unwilling to reconnect my 6 MB conventional DSL after this fiasco, so I advised them to go fuck themselves and took their w
WTF? (Score:2)
ATT advertises bundles starting at $59 a month on its website, stating, “U-verse delivers television, phone and Internet services — all from a single fiber optic cable at the speed of light.
On what planet? Because here on Earth they use phone lines and DSL for everything. I wouldn't be surprised if AT&T hasn't laid 1 foot of fiber anywhere in the US. That's what Time Warner does, not them.
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AT&T has laid a super crapload of fiber all over the US. They were the first to bring fiber nearly everywhere and in many places have the only fiber into a county or other locality. Lake County, California is one of those places. AT&T has literally the only fiber link in and out, which runs along the 20 in both directions. The local WISP brings in cogent from wireless links across four mountaintops to avoid using them.
Re:Which states? (Score:5, Informative)
Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Alabama and Oklahoma are cited across multiple sources, including http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/90315/att-u-verse-experiencing-widespread-outages . I couldn't find any other sources that mentioned three more states, but eyeballing a map of the US, and how some mentioned the 'southwest' too, I suspect Arizona and New Mexico may be involved as well.
Re:Which states? (Score:5, Funny)
Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Alabama and Oklahoma
Is it just me or has the internet seemed a little smarter on average for the last few days...
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And your downloads take a long time too!
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It's a tongue in cheek slam on the luddite South...which is majority WHITE.
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From what I've gathered from various sources, the specific problem is that the server used to authenticate the RG to U-verse is borked. So... as long as your RG was authenticated PRIOR to the outage, your service should keep working. HOWEVER, if you lose power (or something else happens that requires it to re-authenticate), your service will go bye-bye too until they get the problem fixed.
Right now, I'm hoping that authentication isn't required for DHCP renewal... because if it is, those of us who had servi
Re:Which states? (Score:5, Informative)
Not a complete list, but its limited to more southern states. FTA:
"Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Alabama and Oklahoma."
Re:Which states? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's all the areas being affected, posting anon since I work for them, and I'm not entirely sure I'm allowed to post this info.
Atlanta (Tucker), GA
Baton Rouge, LA
Birmingham, AL
Charleston, SC
Charlotte, NC
Columbia, SC
Fayetteville, AR
Greensboro, NC
Greenville, SC
Jackson, MS
Jacksonville, FL
Knoxville, TN
Little Rock, AR
Louisville, KY
Memphis, TN
Miami, FL
Mobile, AL
Nashville, TN
New Orleans, LA
Oklahoma City, OK
Orlando (Daytona Beach), FL
Raleigh, NC
Tulsa, OK
West Palm Beach, FL
These areas should be resolved by now:
Austin, TX
Corpus Christi, TX
Dallas (Richardson), TX
El Paso, TX
Houston, TX
Lubbock, TX
Odessa (Midland), TX
San Antonio, TX
Here's what I know about it as a lowly peon in the company: The DHCP daemon on a server in Richardson, TX, can't handle all the DHCP requests, and so keeps restarting every 10 minutes. When it's up, requests go through fine.
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Re:Which states? (Score:5, Informative)
Clever, but can't work with U-Verse: The supplied "Home Gateway" (VDSL modem and router combo-box) is sufficiently locked-down to preclude any such tinkering. The WAN address (and gateway, and, and, and) comes from DHCP, period, address if there is no DHCP response then it defaults to 0.0.0.0.
In this state it cannot route packets, since it has no valid default route, and it stays broken until DHCP gets un-borked.
Furthermore, the only modems that work with U-Verse are those supplied by AT&T, so there's no chance of using third-party gear to work around the issue.
(That all said: What the fuck, AT&T? 15 states all relying on one box? I've been bitched out here on Slashdot for running a singular mail server with no diverse redundancy for a small company, while you've got fuckloads of paying customers relying on one machine?)
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Get with the program. Executives can't get funding for their bonuses if the company is going to spend money on actual infrastructure.
There was this article that stated that AT&T's infrastructure expenditure has been flat for the past few years while rates have risen. I suppose running on one DHCP server is one way to save money.
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Meh.
Yes, my rates have gone up (though not appreciably) with AT&T over the past few years.
But having folks rely on one single point of failure in a system of this scale is a problem that is easily and cheaply corrected, and this is something that should be well-known within companies such as AT&T whose whole business model has always revolved around providing and maintaining reliable infrastructure.
(And by "cheap," I mean a few thousand dollars in hardware and a crew to implement and test it. Total
Re:My over-reaction (Score:5, Interesting)
My parents have U-verse at their house, and had a similar experience. It took almost 6 months before the service could even be considered near reliable. Even still, they only get about half of their advertised speed, but it's still the best option where they live. And they don't live out in the boonies, they live on the LA/Orange county border, in a city of over 100k people. I however, DO live out in the boonies (Comparitavely speaking), and have Verizon FIOS with a 150/75Mbit connection, that is consistently the speed that was advertised, and costs less than their U-verse.
My parents recently had an interesting problem with their service. They kept finding little pools of water near the switch that the U-verse technician installed in their bedroom, with the switch fried. After technicians had replaced their second or third switch, they finally decided to look into what was causing the problem. When the technician ran the original wire (Which went outside of their house), he didn't use outdoor rated cable. After about a year in the sun, it had developed little cracks in the cable jacket, and capillary action was running water from the cracks all the way to the switch.
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It may not have been the installer's fault. I've seen "outdoor rated" cable fail similarly: I have behind me a multi-$k box which was ruined by some allegedly high-quality, white-jacketed Belden RG6 with "Outdoor" printed on the jac
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Then they installed it incorrectly. If you create a drip loop and caulk the cable entering the building where it should point downward, this should keep water out.
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Reading comprehension fail.
Water can travel -through- cables. And as reported by OP, this is exactly what happened. I, myself, cast no doubt upon his observations.
A drip loop does not, and cannot, prevent the transfer of fluid inside of a cable jacket by wicking, capillary action, or by dissimilar temperatures and pressures.
A drip loop is formed to shed water that is external to the cable jacket: Water traveling along the outside of the jacket tends to fall off, due to gravity, upon encountering a drip l
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Re:Whole home party! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm guessing probably not.
I have U-Verse, and they do a real chickenshit maneuver with the DVR, in that somehow it phones home before it will play any of YOUR LOCAL RECORDED CONTENT. This sucks, I assume it's to make sure you're not a deadbeat before it will play or do anything else but if your internet is out, for whatever reason, you can't even watch your locally recorded shows to fill time until the service returns.
Did I say that sucks?
FWIW my service in IL is unaffected, for now, anyway...
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Most cablebox DVRs do that as well - they check to make sure you're subscribed to cable first b
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Doesn't matter if most DVRs do it, it still sucks. A couple years ago I lost my cable on a thursday, this is when I realized I couldn't watch recorded shows when cable is down). A tech was out friday, spent 10 minutes outside somewhere, my cable worked again. Tech left, 10 minutes later my cable died again. Called em up, as monday was a holiday nobody could come out until next tuesday.
IMHO, this is bovine manure. It's not my fault the cable went out, nor that the first guy didn't fix it right. I'm pay
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Their TV-over-DSL has worked great for us for the last five years. It's their ToS that sucks.
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so much for un-interrupted service.
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It doesn't matter how competent your engineers are (Xerox PARC, Bell Labs) if your management is a bunch of idiots.