Re: What do you do when your Home ISP is down?

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

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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