What do you do when your Home ISP is down?

Thu Aug 18 17:44:28 UTC 2011

On Thu, 18 Aug 2011, Mark Keymer wrote:

> I am wondering what some of you guys do when your home ISP is down. At
> least those of you that don't give yourself internet.
>
> I myself have a cable provider at home that I use. And I find it quite
> frustrating to call and report issues in there network, because the
> people in the call center have you do the same things every time and are
> not very technical.

It can be frustrating talking to their frontline people, but unless you 
have contacts there in network engineering, what else are you going to do? 
Just like I say to customers, if internet connectivity is that important 
to you, get two.  I currently have BHN (cable internet) and Centurylink 
(DSL along with their PrismTV product) at home.  Centurylink has been a 
disaster.  Their DSL service has been about the least reliable internet 
product I've ever used, which unfortunately makes their PrismTV equally 
unreliable.  The plan had been to transition from BHN to Centurylink, but 
that seems highly unlikely unless they can figure out how to get my DSL 
working properly.

When we had a remote office a few blocks away from the data center, there 
too, we had dual service (BHN cable internet, and at the time it was 
Embarq for DSL).  It's not hard to setup a linux firewall / VPN client to 
automatically switch the default route when one provider's service quits 
working.

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  Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
  Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
  Atlantic Net                |
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