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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