Two outages in less than a month! This is not good, folks. And the fact that we have still not received a full accounting on the first one just compounds the frustration. There is also no system in place to provide an emergency alert (via radio and TV, of course) which would let us know what’s happening. What is AT&T thinking?
TreeHugger – Over on the RTC mailing list a few people have mentioned their DSL had gone down. But it appears it only affected small pockets of people as others had no problem. Our office downtown Eureka is on AT&T DSL and we didn’t have any problems.
Wow.. Mr. Foster. Thanks Mr. Park-Ranger, or may I call you Carson?
Our thought was that at least, notification could be made to local radio to make announcements. Of course, the station that is on live the most is located in Ferndale, which was unable to receive phone calls from “the other side of the river.” I’m thinking of investing in a stable of ponies to make the run next time.
Did anyone’s internet go down again (3rd time) on Tues., Jan. 23rd, in Eureka? Our work server, mail, internet was down, and we checked with AT&T, and they confirmed there was an outtage in Eureka. But didn’t see a peep in the local media.
I forgot to attribute Mr. Foster’s original “backhoe in Mendocino” idea. I’ve adopted it myself for purposes of illustration when I talk to folks who are not sufficiently alarmed about our lack of fiber redundancy.
Information from AT&T during disrupted service would be welcomed, but how would they get the word out?
O.k. CPR, I’ve got alibis for both incidents. Plus, I’m from Southern Humboldt…
RTC gave a letter to Gary Philp about getting at&t to inform the public about these outages. I spoke to him yesterday and he’s supportive of doing something. At the very least, that knowledge would spare my children the trauma of hearing my profanity-laced attempts to get my network back online.
Bob D. has made a good point. All it takes is one bearded Mendocino militant with a backhoe and Humboldt County would be thrown into utter chaos!
We’re just lucky that this has happened during less-than-peak production times for most of us. Banking and commerce have now become completely dependent upon the Internet, so redundancy is critical.
Yeah. Public safety is a big talking point on the need for a second fiber line. Along with economy, education, health. It’s just a matter of getting the ducks in a row to get a corporation on line to build the fiber. It’s probably going to take 18 months or more to get it done, though.
Since I made the switch from Suddenlink to SBC-Global earlier in the week, I misread Saturday’s outage as a problem with my set-up, which I’d been fine tuning with help from ATT/Yahoo tech dept. I called them up and spent maybe 30 minutes on the phone jumping through various hoops with one tech then another — for some reason they could not tell that the whole system was out.
My wife was out shopping — she found that commerce had basically come to a standstill. Pretty scary. Something just occurred to me: Has anyone thought to spin the problem to the government as a Homeland Security issue? Maybe there’s money out there to provide redundancy if it protects us from “the terrorists.”
Too funny. It was their announcement that they could not get the weather report because of the internet not working that prompted me to try to call Tina. When my landline phone was unable to connect to a Eureka call, I had my answer.
KHSU DJ was making statements about a fiber outage around 8 AM. I called him. He said he had called the National Weather Service when he couldn’t get online for weather reports. Their connection was down as well and they assumed another fiber failure. So, he assumed that’s what it was.
We should not have to rely on ad hoc citizen reports when these things happen.
I called Patrick Cleary from KHUM, etc. and he called one of his people. The funny thing is that he called them on their cell because he could not call into Ferndale. I was talking to him from Ferndale, but not at my house, so I was not able to call the station directly either. If it were not having to be at my son’s basketball practice, I guess I could have written it down and walked it over. Very modern.
Fortunately at least a couple of the local radio stations gave out some info on the outage. Not sure when they started. I first found out the rough details around 2pm.