What do you do when your Home ISP is down?

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Thu Aug 18 19:25:45 UTC 2011


On Aug 18, 2011, at 10:44 AM, Jon Lewis wrote:

> 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.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
> Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
> Atlantic Net                |
> _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________

I use a somewhat similar approach… I needed fast, reliable internet access. I have Comcast Cable for fast and Raw Bandwidth DSL for reliable.

The DSL has been rock solid and has only failed once in several years.

Comcast at first (before I switched to business class) had trouble achieving one 9 of availability. I would estimate their current service somewhere between two and three 9s, since I don't count the random renumbering event against them. (If I counted those, it'd be two 9s).

Owen

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