Friday, November 30, 2012

Triple threat

Most Internet providers will offer a "Triple Play" - TV, Internet, and phone all delivered through a single wire and a single box.  It's convenient, and usually beats a la carte pricing of each service.  But it brings a single point of failure - that single wire or device.

Camp Borepatch is off the air, because AT&T can't seem to get us a box that works.  They're overnighting the third box to us, so I'll swap it in tomorrow.  It'll be interesting to see what the kids do without 'net access - and if some of their games won't run without contacting an authentication server first.  Good times, good times.

Companies with a clue plan for this sort of thing, with two separate physical connections to their building, and with two separate Internet providers.  That fails if both connections attach to the same SONET ring, and Bob the Builder goes berserk with a backhoe, but still.

Oh, and AT&T staffs their support line with monkeys.  Polite monkeys, to be sure, but a monkey who refuses to deviate from his checklist.  I'm not as technical as I used to be, but hokey smokes.

8 comments:

Dave H said...

And people wonder why I still have a landline phone instead of switching to Roadrunner's digital system. I like being able to hear a dial tone when the lights go out. (Not as big an issue now with cell phones because base stations are reasonably hard, but if your phone's not charged it's not going to get any better during a power outage.)

Matt said...

At my last company, the networking guys called them FSBs, for Fiber Seeking Backhoes.

Story time:
We had a facility in a city that tried to put in disaster recovery planning on their telco infrastructure. The city had the telco put in redundant rings so infrastructure could put taps onto each one and survive an outage.

The company that laid the wire got lazy. BOTH rings were laid in the same trench, at the same depth, only 6 inches from each other.

One FSB took out both loops with one dig.

Yeah, that was fun.

Ruth said...

I have fun de-railing check lists. By the 3rd time I've called I can usually spout off the things done and the results of such in the same order as on their list. It usually takes them a few seconds to catch back up and figure out where to go next....

commoncents said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Borepatch said...

commoncents, I deleted your comment because it was off topic link spam.

Tacitus said...

Spam and Link sausage do contain similar distasteful ingredients....

Speaking of similar, and distasteful, nothing but troubles with ATT at Colonia Tacitum.

Tacitus

Old NFO said...

Oh yeah, real 'weiners' on the cookbooks these days... When in doubt, escalate! And hope you get things fixed tomorrow!

DaddyBear said...

We had a backhoe/trencher tear up the only digital landline between Tucson and Sierra Vista once. Story I got was that whoever marked the cable for the construction company messed up. We didn't have Internet or long distance phone for days.