InternetNews had an article about DSL problems at PacBell and COVAD. http://www.internetnews.com/isp-news/article/0,2171,8_347841,00.html It appears COVAD blames their problems on AT&T and Qwest cable outages, which did happen. But I have reports from half-a-dozen different people reporting several different outages due to switch failures, switch limits being exceeded, code upgrade failures, including one upgrade where the code crashed at one office one night, and the next night COVAD loaded it on the next office which also crashed. PacBell's DSL outage was reportedly due to a switch failure, although PacBell couldn't tell or wouldn't tell, how many customers were affected by it. Is this simply a case of different providers having switch problems at the same time? Typical problems of deploying bleeding edge technology?
On Thu, Apr 27, 2000 at 01:16:20AM -0700, Sean Donelan wrote:
InternetNews had an article about DSL problems at PacBell and COVAD.
http://www.internetnews.com/isp-news/article/0,2171,8_347841,00.html
It appears COVAD blames their problems on AT&T and Qwest cable outages, which did happen. But I have reports from half-a-dozen different people reporting several different outages due to switch failures, switch limits being exceeded, code upgrade failures, including one upgrade where the code crashed at one office one night, and the next night COVAD loaded it on the next office which also crashed.
As a corporate customer of Covad, services lately has been very poor. Very often they supposely do code or card upgrades in the switches but they don't check if all customers are back up. So we have to call each user affected in. New orders are also taking longer and longer, their front end seems to loose more clue every day
PacBell's DSL outage was reportedly due to a switch failure, although PacBell couldn't tell or wouldn't tell, how many customers were affected by it.
Is this simply a case of different providers having switch problems at the same time? Typical problems of deploying bleeding edge technology?
Pachell also has often a response time problem. I know of at least two locations were down for over 5 days, because they had a switch problem there and it took them that long to get it repaired. -- Regards, Ulf. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Ulf Zimmermann, 1525 Pacific Ave., Alameda, CA-94501, #: 510-769-2936 Alameda Networks, Inc. | http://www.Alameda.net | Fax#: 510-521-5073
PacBell's DSL outage was reportedly due to a switch failure, although PacBell couldn't tell or wouldn't tell, how many customers were affected by it.
Is this simply a case of different providers having switch problems at the same time? Typical problems of deploying bleeding edge technology?
Pachell also has often a response time problem. I know of at least two locations were down for over 5 days, because they had a switch problem there and it took them that long to get it repaired.
This is also the case for Bell Atlantic. I've been down twice in the last two month for over 5 days (at my home), and I know of several other customers who have had multi-day outages. Widespread outages seem to be resolved within 24-48 hours (DC/Nor VA/MD was down recently for almost 2 days), which is bad enough, but problems invoving a single CO, or just a few customers, tend to be resolved whenever someone at BA feels like finding something to do, which apparently isn't often. Call support is terrible as well, but we won't even go into that. Normally, with issues like this, I'd say tough luck and find yourself another provider, but in most of these long-outage cases, at least on the east coast, the problem has been with the circuit being down, which, in most areas, is still provided by your telco. So even if you had a different provider supplying your connection (Flashcom, etc.), you would still be down. I thought this was supposed to be a competitive market? -- Nick Bastin Software Developer OPNET Technologies
I don't know if it is policy across BA turf, but they are telling us that Massachusetts response time for a trouble ticket is 72 hours. If a whole CO goes down, someone's got to respond. If a single circuit goes down, it can take up to 72 hours for the tester to pick up your ticket. So your 2 5 day outages can be: 1-2 days to pick up the ticket, 1-2 days of claiming it is CPE or someone else's problem, 1 day to fix. As to the other provider scenario, Covad and Northpoint sell SDSL services in MA on BA circuits, but they get far better response times out of BA than BA customers do. You can get a ticket and have a vendor meet on site in as little as 2 days. Apparently Covad and Northpoint are able to negotiate better support than BA is willing to give it's customers and BA ADSL resellers ... makes you wonder why they missed their "800,000 installed line" quota by several hundred thousand circuits. -travis On Thu, 27 Apr 2000, Nick Bastin wrote:
This is also the case for Bell Atlantic. I've been down twice in the last two month for over 5 days (at my home), and I know of several other customers who have had multi-day outages. Widespread outages seem to be resolved within 24-48 hours (DC/Nor VA/MD was down recently for almost 2 days), which is bad enough, but problems invoving a single CO, or just a few customers, tend to be resolved whenever someone at BA feels like finding something to do, which apparently isn't often. Call support is terrible as well, but we won't even go into that.
Normally, with issues like this, I'd say tough luck and find yourself another provider, but in most of these long-outage cases, at least on the east coast, the problem has been with the circuit being down, which, in most areas, is still provided by your telco. So even if you had a different provider supplying your connection (Flashcom, etc.), you would still be down.
I thought this was supposed to be a competitive market?
-- Nick Bastin Software Developer OPNET Technologies
> I don't know if it is policy across BA turf, but they are telling us that > Massachusetts response time for a trouble ticket is 72 hours. > If a single circuit goes down, it > can take up to 72 hours for the tester to pick up your ticket. That's the theory here in Pac Bell country as well... However we have DSL lines for some of our employees' houses, and one of them went down a week and a half ago. After seven days, I got email back confirming that I'd opened a ticket, and giving me the ticket number. I called back today, three days later, and found out that although a ticket had been opened, it was still in queue, and they didn't expect to get to it today. So that's ten days and counting. -Bill
Yikes! And I thought out US West service was bad! US(eless) West is notorious for DLS service that stays up while the phone line is down! It's happened to me three times for a total of 78 hours! The great thing is that they allow only "certified" technicians to touch these circuits, so even if the tech at the CO can see that the phone line has been cut on the telco side of the DSL modem at the CO, he can't touch it! And of course all the "certified" techs only work 9am-4pm weekdays (at least the residential DSL ones). Once when I got through to their tech. support call center, the guy on the phone was almost in tears, he'd had to tell that to so many pissed off customers. I've been trying to figure out if I can call everyone I want to via the Internet, maybe I don't need that voice line at all... ;-) JMH Bill Woodcock wrote: ...
So that's ten days and counting.
-Bill
-- John Hall <j.hall@f5.com> F5 Networks, Inc. Senior Test Engineer 206-505-0800 Gratitude, like love, is never a dependable international emotion. -- Joseph Alsop
I thought that was USworst? ALso try www.dialpad.com for VOI and telephony gateway. Currently free.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of John Hall Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2000 9:49 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: DSL problems (PacBell and Covad)
Yikes! And I thought out US West service was bad! US(eless) West is notorious for DLS service that stays up while the phone line is down! It's happened to me three times for a total of 78 hours! The great thing is that they allow only "certified" technicians to touch these circuits, so even if the tech at the CO can see that the phone line has been cut on the telco side of the DSL modem at the CO, he can't touch it! And of course all the "certified" techs only work 9am-4pm weekdays (at least the residential DSL ones).
Once when I got through to their tech. support call center, the guy on the phone was almost in tears, he'd had to tell that to so many pissed off customers.
I've been trying to figure out if I can call everyone I want to via the Internet, maybe I don't need that voice line at all... ;-)
JMH
Bill Woodcock wrote: ...
So that's ten days and counting.
-Bill
-- John Hall <j.hall@f5.com> F5 Networks, Inc. Senior Test Engineer 206-505-0800
Gratitude, like love, is never a dependable international emotion. -- Joseph Alsop
participants (7)
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Bill Woodcock -
John Hall -
Nick Bastin -
Roeland M.J. Meyer -
Sean Donelan -
Travis Pugh -
Ulf Zimmermann