A Nationwide Comcast Landline Outage is Affecting Thousands of Businesses (theverge.com) 97
Comcast's Xfinity phone service is apparently suffering a massive outage today, knocking out phone service for thousands of companies across the country that still largely rely on landline access to do business. From a report: According to DownDetector.com, Comcast phone service began experiencing issues around 8AM ET this morning and by the afternoon, areas around the country have started reporting disruptions. The areas most affected appear to be the Pacific Northwest, California, the tri-state area, and Florida. The official support Twitter account for Comcast Xfinity's residential and business services has acknowledged the issues, tweeting at 1PM ET today that some "customers may still be experiencing an issue with their Voice service," though Comcast has yet to release an official statement regarding the issue.
The "tri state area"? (Score:2)
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Obviously, the tri-state area can only mean the Cincinnati area. There are no other points on the map where 3 states meet. /sarc
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Well, it does rule out the four corners region.
Well, perhaps it's bad in three of those states, but Arizona got spared thanks to the heroic efforts of Joe Arpaio...
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Obviously, the tri-state area can only mean the Cincinnati area. There are no other points on the map where 3 states meet. /sarc
Just in case someone overlooks the "sarcasm" tag... here's why it was a sarcastic comment
Massachussetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island.
Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas.
Oregon, California, Nevada.
Montana, Idaho, Wyoming.
I could go on...
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I could go on...
And indeed you should have! I live in the NJ, NY, PA tri-state area you insensitive clod!
HRMMPH!!!! ;)
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TMI
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My home is near the border of three states. I work and live in one state, and I go shopping in an other. The third state, doesn't have close by major towns, so I don't go there much.
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Yea it is kind of ambiguous, for those interested these are the main ones in the US:Tri-state areas [wikipedia.org].
Less robbo callers today (Score:1)
I havent had my robocalls today, they must be comcast customers
Re:Only idiots (Score:5, Informative)
I work at 9-1-1.
EVERYONE should have a landline, even if you never use it. The day you need it for 9-1-1, you'll be glad.
See, it's not just the reliability of landline...it's the instant and infallible (mostly) address lookup.
Any other calling service, IP phones, VoIP software, cellular, radio, satellite...you have a slim chance of the address appearing instantly on the dispatcher's screen. A few seconds can be the difference between dying and living. Also, FYI many calls include a caller who CAN'T say where they are due to suffering, bleeding, screaming, fear, being chased, burning flames, etc. YOU WANT YOUR ADDRESS TO APPEAR AUTOMATICALLY.
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This needs a +5. Sadly I have none to contribute to this INSIGHTFUL comment.
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Actually I should have typed INFORMATIVE
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Posting AC because I just modded it up to +5.
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My family knows CPR
Awesome, your family should know how to sustain a heart attack victim until a paramedic arrives. I assume, since you don't like "worthless government services", you are going to call around each hospital to find one with an ambulance available?
I have a pond with several thousand gallons of water and two trash pumps that can do about 250 gallons per minute each.
Also awesome, probably useful to help keep things in check until the professionals arrive with the proper tools. Unless you have heat resistant gear, SCBAs, ladder trucks, multiple hoses, nozzles and a bunch of friends ready jump at a minute's notice too?
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See, it's not just the reliability of landline...it's the instant and infallible (mostly) address lookup.
Or we could join the 21st century and actually send our GPS coordinates or other location service information to 911 operators.
Personally there are plenty of seconds saved NOT having to go find a landline. Plus in many countries the 911 operator will actually talk you through what to do which works exceptionally well when you're not forced to leave the victim.
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It is safer to wait for tech to close this small vulnerability than to shoulder the social burden of having a landline.
It's like AOL
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I work at 9-1-1.
EVERYONE should have a landline, even if you never use it. The day you need it for 9-1-1, you'll be glad.
See, it's not just the reliability of landline...it's the instant and infallible (mostly) address lookup.
Any other calling service, IP phones, VoIP software, cellular, radio, satellite...you have a slim chance of the address appearing instantly on the dispatcher's screen. A few seconds can be the difference between dying and living. Also, FYI many calls include a caller who CAN'T say where they are due to suffering, bleeding, screaming, fear, being chased, burning flames, etc. YOU WANT YOUR ADDRESS TO APPEAR AUTOMATICALLY.
I once saw a youtube video of someone trying to call 911 after a home invasion. He was tied and gagged and it was fun him trying to explain what happened and where he was to the operator.
hahaha "even 911 calls" (Score:1)
love that bit of unnecessary sensationalism under the headline at the link, yeah duh, if the phone is down it won't call 911 either. Let's make it really spicy and say that "even calls to pro-Democrat fund raising and lobbyist organizations"
Re:hahaha "even 911 calls" (Score:4, Interesting)
In the pre-VoIP days when phone lines were hard-wired into the central office, you were always able to pick up the phone and get a dialtone to at least dial the operator or call 911. The VoIP part is the big difference since you need all 7 OSI layers in place before you can even think about making a call. POTS central offices had batteries providing backup power and the system was designed to be as resilient as possible...but you can't do much more than voice with a system like that.
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It's not sensationalism. In that location, you cannot call 911 on any phone, Comcast or not, because the 911 call center itself is down. In other areas, naturally your Comcast line can't call 911 (or anything else), but your cellphone would still work.
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but your cellphone would still work
But as someone in a higher thread noted, if you become incapacitated, your call for help will likely not be traceable.
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That's not the same situation as call 911, nothing happens though. That's why reporting that especially bad situation was not at all an attempt to sensationalize.
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nonsense, 911 centers do locate cell phones. in some situations the location may not be exact, but that happens with VOIP calls too.
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no. wrong.
If you actually read the article, the police put out a message saying customers wouldn't be able to reach 911 center if they had comcast voip, to use cell phone instead.
wow, you swallow the sensationalism hook, line and sinker. hope you have a good spam and ad blocker so you don't go bankrupt believing the B.S. you'd read.
and 20 years ago this was unheard of (Score:4, Insightful)
20 years ago your phone never went down, it just worked. Always...
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I never had any children, not a grandpa, now get off my lawn!
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20 years ago your phone never went down, it just worked. Always...
... on the other hand, you could only use it within a few feet of the wall jack - depending on how long your handset cord was. And if you had a wireless handset (as most people did by then), you were SOL even if the phone line itself was technically still up.
We kept an old Bell Slimline phone plugged into the phone jack in the bedroom for exactly this reason.
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I remember the old party lines. I'd lift the receiver and hear someone else talking on the phone. Yes, I'm that old.
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Shit, I remember visiting a rural relative about, oh, twenty, maybe twenty-five years ago, still had a party line.
I also remember having 'pen pals' which involved writing on special extra-thin paper, envelopes with red and blue stripes on the border, and waiting six to eight weeks to reply.
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20 years ago your phone never went down, it just worked. Always...
That isn't even remotely true.
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maybe not always, but you didn't hear about it 6-8 times a year either. I can't tell you how many times my relatives have complained about their VOIP phones being down because fo Comcast.
Not just Florida... (Score:5, Informative)
I've just been on the phone with Comcast for over 2 hours. This is from Chicago down to Florida and spread all over. I have locations that I take care of across Georgia and Florida and every single Comcast location is affected. VoIP and landlines alike. They can't even forward the lines I need forwarded because their system has locked the Voice team out of that function.
This is the second time in, what?, 6 months or so that they've been hit with a vast, multi-state outage. We depend on fax lines (yes, still the most secure form of communication when it comes to HIPAA and related issues - plus the easiest to train/utilize), and my company will be missing everything from our affected locations for 4+ hours. Tens of thousands of dollars in immediate jeopardy with much more in possible losses to come.
Want to bet we won't even get a credit on our next bill? Ma Bell might have been a bastard monopolistic company, but copper lines in the ground had better up-time than a lot of what I've witnessed moving to VoIP and such technologies. Now get off my lawn, you're standing on the fiber lines.
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I;m dealing with pretty much the same scenario in Western WA.
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sending unecrypted faxes over phone lines is the most secure method? bahaha.
https://luxsci.com/blog/hipaa-fax-breach-health-care-finally-stop-faxing.html
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That puts a damper on my initial feeling of schadenfreude upon seeing Comcast outage.
Yes, I hate Comcast, but it's their business customers that are being hurt here.
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Actually where I used to work, we got lots of misdirected medical faxes. Our phone number was just 1 digit off from one of the local clinics and our fax machine would receive medical reports it wasn't supposed to. We'd call them and let them know then feed it to the shredder. So faxes may or may not be "the most secure form of communication when it comes to HIPAA" but it is far from foolproof.
Can You Hear Me Now? (Score:2)
NOPE!
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NOPE!
Verizon should use that in their commercials. "Can you hear me now? Hello! Anyone there? Oh, it's a Comcast number."
All right who did it? (Score:2)
Who forgot to turn of automatic windows updates again???
Tri-state Area? (Score:1)
some points of info (Score:5, Informative)
At roughly 2PM (the past few minutes), service is finally appearing to work again. It was out since start of day at this business at 8AM. Firstly, Comcast Business is not the same as Comcast / Xfinity in terms of service and reliability. I manage an office that uses Comcast Business, and this is the first major outage we've experience since getting the service years ago, save for one time an idiot from a different company literally cut the fiber line a block away from the building.
The phone service is VoIP based, not POTS based. There are very few companies that offer the level of service this business needed, and of those, competitors wanted over $1000/mo each, whereas Comcast is a fraction of that price. Yeah, inb4 "you get what you pay for" - other companies have outages too, they just don't make the front page because they're smaller entities that most have never heard of (our previous contract was with Integra)
Comcast service was not entirely out, only 99%ish out. Outgoing calls could not be made. Incoming calls from most providers would flat out fail. A few (Tmobile for example) would ring through, but voice would not exchange after pickup. I'm personally on Google's Project Fi with my cell phone and could ring through and talk perfectly (but again, could not call out to my phone from the business).
At roughly 2PM (the past few minutes), service is finally appearing to work again. It was out since start of day at this business at 8AM.
VOIP sucks (Score:2)
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Except that the FCC no longer requires companies maintain POTS. That is why you'll see T1s becoming increasingly difficult to get, its why ISDN is almost impossible. Even when you do get a "POTS" it is just pots to the CO where it becomes VOIP and has been for over a decade now. VOIP in and of itself is not a problem.
I deployed and ran an Asterisk/FreePBX solution which was all VOIP all the time. I had a SIP provider that was solid and a PRI T1 I kept as backup. My users never had any issues for about 8 ye
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WHAT!!! Your system requires "ISP to deliver UDP packets reliably"??? UDP?? User Datagram Protocol??? Reliably?
UDP was designed for systems that don't need the packets delivered reliably! If you're requiring it to reliably delivered you are misusing the protocol. TCP is for reliably delivered packets. UDP doesn't even tell you if the packet wasn't delivered.
Re:VOIP sucks (Score:4, Informative)
I doesn't sound like you know much about VoIP to understand why UDP was chosen for the RTP. SIP can use TCP and often does.
Timing is everything in a real-time voice communication. Late packets are useless, hence the reliability of TCP doesn't improve anything. On the contrary: TCP retransmissions delays make the problem worse. A late/missed UDP packet may not even be noticeable (20 ms of audio) or just a brief drop out. A 100 ms retransmission delay in TCP will delay the entire stream, thus causing increased latency making the call sound awkward -- people talking at the same time.
In practice a small amount of packet loss isn't catastrophic to VOIP. Each RTP packet is independent so processing resumes with a next packet if a previous one is lost or late. The problem is large jitter (varying amount of delay, like > 20 ms) and too much delay (>200 ms). Unfortunately shitty routers without QOS flood the connection and both of these metrics are easily broken.
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I wasn't questioning that UDP was faster, I was questioning the assumption that you could depend on it for reliable packet delivery. Your response indicates that you accept that you can't depend on it for reliable packet delivery, but the post I was responding to (was that you?) said that they depended on UDP reliably delivering packets...which is NOT it's designed use case.
What is the tri-state area? (Score:2)
Comcast serves the Tri-State Area [wikia.com]?
Seriously... do you realize how many tri-state areas there are within the United States? More than a dozen [wikipedia.org].
Now someone tell Comcast to stop installing self-destruct buttons on their VOIP-inators.
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Those aren't landlines (Score:2)
Xfinity phone service is VoIP, not "landlines", outages are expected (and common). If your phone is important to you, don't use VoIP... voice T1's are cheap these days and if you don't need all 24 voice lines, you can split it between voice and data and get a reliable (though slow) backup internet connection.
Comcast sucks ass (Score:1)
It's bad enough our phones don't work
We can't even get them forwarded to lines that do work
We can't login to Comcast business portal
We can't call Comcast business number and talk to a human there is literally no option for that.
For an outage of this size and duration there has been zero communication from Comcast other than to repeat what everyone already knew before calling... "experiencing an issue". Their main business website should have a statement of some kind or one should be buried somewhere. Lite
How? (Score:2)
Ridiculous!