speakeasy/megapath (was RE: CenturyLink/DirectTV)

[Michael Butash]

I'm pretty particular about "outages", most instilled from business that 
there's a big different between 99.99 and 99.999 percent uptime on 
networks.  Modems locking up classify as that, but physical signal 
issues are more often where those are directed, or upstream headend 
equipment failures outside windows.  I hear from a few folks their 
modems do that, but it's a bit of a misnomer considering most dsl modems 
are also a router/firewall, and one of questionable performance.

Back when bittorrent wasn't being lorded by ambulance-chasing lawyers 
trying to sue everyone using it, I could crush my old pix firewall with 
connection amounts generated by it (+2000 at times naturally).  So much 
so, I actually imposed static limits on tcp/udp translations for it, but 
not easy to do when it began hiding in other ports and protocols.  Older 
or more cpu-bound consumer routers (or crappy code on them) can easily 
get crushed with a few-thousand connections tracked for nat purposes, so 
wouldn't surprise me if the "outages" are somewhat self-inflicted with 
cpu/memory for nat simply getting exhausted.  It's been years since I've 
had to reboot the cox modem that wasn't a somewhat planned outage (I 
usually ask one of their backbone guys that knows).  I'd rather it stay 
a dumb modem and let my asa handle the rest.

Bell telco's might as well equal government run, and sadly I find their 
union influence drags their quality down as they create more problem 
than they fix (and they don't/can't get fired).  When they have outages, 
it's usually pretty large and egregious, and i see this much more with 
business services.  Cox is _very_ anti-union, and I understand why, 
other than simple corporate greed.  Same could be said of Cox's 
residential contracted installers however being of questionable quality 
standards.  I have personal issues with the Belle's, but no less than 
with Cox or others - I simply have found cable internet over time to be 
superior in service offering, and not just pride of having helped build 
the tech, or Cox.

In the end, use what works for you, and what you find acceptable in your 
area.  Some parts of town simply have notoriously bad coax feeders, or 
2wire for dsl that cannot practically be fixed thus giving you little 
option in one over another.

Show me single-mode fiber in the ground at my house at a reasonable 
cost, I guarantee you my opinion, and isp would change.  mmm, optical.

-mb


On 07/30/2012 08:46 AM, Carruth, Rusty wrote:
> However, you guys talking about 'outages' make me go - huh?  Outage?
> I'm sure we've had some, but I haven't seen anything but the periodic
> lockup of my DSL modem such that I have to power cycle it (no more than
> once a month - in fact the last time I did that was probably 4 months
> ago) - and I'm not sure I can blame them for that (it's my own modem -
> previous one died and I just threw my own in there).  Well, ok I
> remember there have been scheduled outages at times, but their scheduled
> maintenance is almost always between midnight and 6am, as far as I
> remember, so I don't remember ever being offline due to them.  I may
> have been, but I don't remember it...)
>