What vexes VoIP users?

Tue Mar 1 00:49:58 UTC 2011

On Feb 28, 2011, at 7:24 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Joe Greco" <jgreco at ns.sol.net>
> 
>> Yeah, um, well, hate to ruin that glorious illusion of the legacy
>> physical plant, but Ma Bell mostly doesn't run copper all the way
>> back to a real CO with a real battery room these days when they're
>> deploying new copper. So if you have a house built more than maybe
>> 20 years ago, yeah, you're more likely to have a pair back to the CO,
>> but if you've ordered a second line, or you're in a new subdivision
>> and you're far from the CO, the chances you're actually on copper back
>> to the CO drops fairly quickly.
> 
> Ok, sure.  But probably to an RSU, which -- as I noted to Owen just now --
> is engineered and monitored to quite a bit higher standards than I'm 
> betting Comcast or FiOS is.

Well, I have to go back to the hurricanes of 04 for a personal view of this "higher standards".  

Cable went down because of cable cuts (expected) and because of no power backup longer than a short time with batteries.  CO's faired a scoch better but when their battery banks went dry it was over because the gensets never autostarted and there was no one here on the coast in central Florida to intervene.

All cell phones were toast except old Bell South. Local worked through both Cat 3's and then LD came back later. Don't know whether it was towers with only short term batts or power to fiber was disrupted.  36+ hours after both Cat 3's all BellSouth wireless was back up but with load issues as you can imagine. Other carriers took days.

My home internet is wireless to my colo and then via 4 carriers out.  All but one carrier died after 24+ hours of outage. Colo was fine an humming.  Feedback later was that the problems were due to poor maintenance of generators and failover equipment and understanding of disasters.  

Bottom line is my VOIP worked because I had luck or at least I was proactive and my cell worked because I was lucky.

Today, given the margins and the amount of reinvestment and maintenance  I doubt that either cable or POTS would hack a disruption like this which is not out of the question. I doubt that they would do as good.

Tom
PS as for the comment that your mother wouldn't use VOIP, my mother in her 80's uses VOIP and loves it.