The AT&T tech came over and checked my rig declaring it fit to fight. He mentioned that I am not the only one having this issue and that people with problems are spread all over a big area of the zip code, not one localized section. AT&T techs are trying to localize where is the problem, bit no luck yet That means somebody damaged the big fiber cable and did not fess up.
I am tethered to the phone and T Mobile informed me I have used all the high speed assigned to me so now I am at AOL Dial Up speeds. text comes up fast, other stuff? not so much. Blogging will be limited.
Now, it is a nice day, go out and play.
Ouch. Sorry to hear of your bandwidth limitations. It is highly unlikely it is a big fiber outage. If it was a fiber outage they would have already re-routed around the outage or fixed it. When things are F’ing broke, they are easy to find and fix. It is the dang small random things that are a pain to find and resolve.
I happened to be working with a group that was setting up the “new” high speed networks for the Army. This is at a time when an OC12 was considered huge.
The rule of thumb was that an OC-12 had to have two different paths to the end point. So the fiber came north to post, then left moving north to the next point. If the fiber were to break south of post, then the north path would be able to carry all of the traffic from post.
For short haul situations, it was done at a physical level like this.
When contracts were let for long haul, it was written with a requirement for dual redundant paths. When the fiber was delivered it was checked and the paths did indeed have redundancy. So all of these contracts were being let to one large telecom company.
Well, said company started to run out of fiber. So they contracted with a different provider to provide dark fiber. This gave them lots and lots of extra bandwidth. And they continued signing contracts.
Then something bad happened. Some rednecks were out in the swamps of _southern state_ and decided to take target practice against these pretty sparkles hanging on the telephone poles. They weren’t high tension and they weren’t power so no big deal.
And they were good shots and managed to cut the freaking cable.
And manage to break the Internet into east and west.
Seems that the contracts and original deliveries had traffic going along a northern route and a redundant southern route. But because that sub contractor needed to do something they did some magic at a low level and what had been a northern route suddenly switch to running over the southern route.
From the view point of the Network people they still had two routes east/west. But they were actually both in the same physical cable separate by a little bit of insulation. When those squirrel hunters took out that single cable, they cut both pieces of fiber and broke all east/west Internet traffic. The net rerouted through Europe/Asia but there just isn’t that much bandwidth on that route.
Regardless of the long story, I hope they get you your internet back up and running soon. You might need to pretend your homeless and start hanging out at McD’s or Starbucks for the “free wifi”
It’s funny, people pick on cable companies, but even here in the boonies of NH I can’t remember any significant internet outages on my Comcast service.
The closest I have come is a period of impaired performance, but even that wasn’t so bad. They ended up replacing the entire 400 foot cable from the road (no charge to me).
Comcast is a dumpster fire in my woods. They still have not moved the distribution pylon/box that goes underwater whenever it rains too much and the lake rises.
Yeah … We switched from Comcast cable to DSL because it is more reliable, and often faster, where we are. The local cable infrastructure is 20-30 years old, apparently; supposedly Comcast bought the local cable co. decades ago and has never upgraded. Or so we’ve been told.
Comcast does an ok job as long as the repair isn’t to big. Which for my old home was replacing cable on something like 20 poles. They refused. They didn’t actually fix anything until I upgraded to “business class” at which point the same people came out and were quickly replacing bad cable.
Same with the phone company, as long as we were talking about one or two pairs, nothing got fixed. As soon as I was talking about a T1, suddenly they found all sorts of things to fix.
For those that speak the geek, in the old days T1 service was provided over one pair. Today it generally delivered as two balanced DSL links over two pair that are then bonded in the “T1” modem. I’ve always wanted to be able to purchase a T2 but they only used them between COs. And I could never afford a T3.