Comcast outages continue even in areas with PG&E power restored

Tue Oct 15 00:58:16 UTC 2019

On 10/14/19 8:26 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:
> So when we were working on this 20 years ago at Cisco, there was a 
> tremendous amount of effort to deal with the issue of e911 and generally 
> battery backup. I'm really surprised to hear that though we went through 
> a lot of effort to deal with the CPE, that the cable plant was the 
> actual problem. The cable companies should, imo, be held to the same 
> standard as the telcos. Maybe even moreso these days since IP has taken 
> over everything. The need for reliable e911 hasn't gone away just 
> because the bits have turned into IP bit these days.

They get around it, at least in part, by selling it as a "VoIP" service 
rather than "phone service".

AT&T does the same with U-Verse voice.  You can still buy POTS from 
AT&T, but it's a separate product with a completely different pricing 
structure from the U-Verse voice product.

Voice over HFC networks is sometimes sold as a POTS-like service.  I've 
only heard of this happening in places where the LEC and cable provider 
happen to end up being one-in-the-same.  In those cases, yeah uptime is 
a big deal.

I think what happens is that the standards get written and equipment 
designed with the assumption that everybody will be deploying all sorts 
of SLA'd, guaranteed services, then 99% of deployments end up being 
exclusively best-effort because it's so much easier and cheaper to deploy.

GPON seems to be an interesting case of this since it's commonly 
deployed by telcos rather than cable MSOs, and, in greenfield 
applications, is often deployed exclusive to copper plant at all.  It's 
pretty common to find GPON ONTs with inbuild UPS monitoring and 
communications as well as ATAs designed to deliver POTS-like service, 
but then a lot of SPs who are NOT the LEC of record just use that 
infrastructure to deliver VoIP-like services and push the UPS 
responsibility off onto the customer.
-- 
Brandon Martin