CenturyLink's Nationwide Outage Affects Millions 105
halfEvilTech writes "CenturyLink, the nation's third largest telco network, is experiencing an outage of its broadband service nationwide, leaving its support systems overwhelmed and even causing its website to hit a few snags this morning. The company, which at last count has 5.8 million broadband subscribers, has no estimates yet on how long it will take to restore service."
CenturyLink is the company that will be providing the Defense Department with the equivalent of Internet2.
Once upon a qwest (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Once upon a qwest (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Qwest's famouse Spirit of Service
For CenturyLink, it was probably a good deal: They get to be a Tier-1 peer, instead of having to pay extortion fees like TIER-2 and 3.
It was a very good deal for Qwest's customers. They went from being limited to 1.5 Mbit to being able to buy "up to" 40 Mbit...
I dumped CenturyLink/Qwest long before then, but my brother supposedly got close to 30 Mbit measured.
Like most telecom idiots, CenturyLink has a 12-month "introductory rate", and they won't negotiate. Since all of their competitors do the same, the practice has become switching networks every year, after the introductory rate expires. The same applies if you have Cable or Satellite TV; customers just switch every year for a lower rate.
I really don't see how being so boneheaded helps either company, but that's telecom in the USA.
No estimates (Score:5, Insightful)
Having dealt with having to provide estimates on service restoration at work, my experience is that by the time you can figure out what it would take to restore service, it won't be long before service is actually restored.
I'm not saying that providing status updates isn't good practice. However, it is usually rare that you'll get an ETA on something being fixed. Maybe if they discover it is a broken line and they actually have to dig it up and fix it and that will take hours you might get an ETA. Usually root cause analysis is 95% of the work in problem solving.
Reminds me of a story at work when some developers decided to actually try to embrace the outsourcing model that was being pushed by management. They sent a list of bugs to the outsourced development team and asked for estimates to fix them. They replied, "no problem, just tell us which lines of code to modify and how and we'll take care of it." Now, THAT is a value-add!
Re:Once upon a qwest (Score:5, Insightful)
Qwest was the only telco to refuse warrantless wiretaps during the Bush era. I was happily a Qwest customer until they got bought out by CenturyLink. I would switch immediately to any telco that guaranteed refusal of any unwarranted requests. Unfortunately, none exist.