On Jun 19, 8:21 am, Steven Lichter <diespamm...@ikillspammers.com>
wrote:
The chances of a failure like he is having are very small because of so
many backups. The problem has to be something external; I have spent 40
years with the phone company, Not AT&T and all of those in Network
Operations.
I'm just a user, but I'm professionally responsible for nearly a dozen
locations in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska (and for awhile, Texas). They
all have broadband of some kind, but most use SBC DSL for cheap VPN
access back to the home branch.
Based on my 5 year experience with them (SBC, now AT&T) since we
started using their DSL, we've seen plenty of problems... like last
year, SBC lost half their ring in the Kansas City area and EVERYONES
service was horrible for about 3 weeks. They had a hard time finding
why and where the ring died (2 days) and then they found out they
didn't have the right gear to switch out - which took another 1.5
weeks to ship, and just under that to install. We had to fall back on
dialup to our locations. I spent a lot of time with the NOC then...
wow.
And then there was the time last year in Springfield MO that an AB
card went on the blink just enough to not really work, but passed
local diagnostics. I knew the trouble was at the rback, but... they
spent a lot of time on site, swapped the modem 3 times, ripped and
replaced gear at the RT at least twice, swapped pairs on the AB...
finally, I talked them into replacing that card at the CO and ...
presto, all was well. Got a interview offer out of that, but turned it
down. =)
Looking at my service logs, I'm averaging almost 3 SBC outages a year
per site. Only my Comcast sites are worse, and QWest before them was
by far the least reliable.
So, yah they have backups at the NOCs, the backbone and maybe even to
the CO in urban areas... but I doubt there is that much redundancy
where A2C's server is at -- Paola, KS. We're too rural.