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Multi-State AT&T U-Verse Outage Enters Third Day
SonicSpike writes "AT&T U-verse customers are reporting this morning that an outage that began Monday and is affecting at least 15 states is still not resolved. Some customers were told this morning that the problem will not be fixed for at least 24 hours."
...is a U-verse subscriber who's freaking out because he can't let his friends know how shitty the service was at McDonalds this morning. Right now he's thinking "They'll never get to hear me say 'Forget the McMuffin, how about some McPoliteness?'"
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
After all, AT&T charges some of the highest rates for internet access in the world, and it's very slow. I assumed that this was because all the money was going into rock solid reliability instead of speed. Right? Right?
They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up for this.
How about a list of the actual states?
Someone forgot to feed the hamster.
sudo make me a sandwich
yes they should. lets just enable it on everyones bill and make the first month free.
turn an outage into a marketing strategy.
Does AT&T even offer an SLA for it's residential customers?
Yes, you get a credit on your account.
Mine is working fine. Sucks to be y 998kjhkh CARRIER LOST
Place nail here >+
No, but there are legal minimums in the state I live in if they want to bill us. The service has to work at least seven days per month. When I was with Charter, they made sure they kept the service up for at least that long each month. All of the down time helped me make friends during football season when a crowd of us would end-up at whichever house among our friends or friends of friends that had working cable on Sundays to watch the NFL. Last fall, Charter was down locally for every single Carolina Panthers game.
We had an odd problem with the U-Verse phone service where it would not display the Caller ID for my MIL.
My wife won't answer the phone if she can't see the Caller ID, so if it says "UNAVAILABLE" she will let it ring.
I tried to get them to figure out what was wrong and after about 2 hours they figured it out.
The rep was very apologetic and offered to "make it up" to us because we were so "understanding"
He offered 1 month of Free HBO
I asked him what was our obligation after that free month.
He paused.
I asked him if we would then get billed for the second month if we didn't cancel.
"Well, yes" was his reply
I asked him if there was ANY other way he was authorized to "make it up" to us.
He told me there was nothing else.
I like microcars
They do not.
-Former U-Verse customer who switched to Charter because of U-Verse incompetence when it came to billing and service issues. And nearly left Charter after having to threaten them with harassment charges after five calls about 'promotional services' in three days at work. Free service for a while assuaged me.
maybe if it was out for 24h but 3 days, they better give out A LOT better then 1mo of HBO
Do peoples DVR still work or are they watchin the radio tonight?
Good to have TV Internet and Phone all bungled I mean bundled up like that....
I had AT&T U-Verse for a year,
promised 18Bbit I was.
I rarely got 5Mbit.
It took 5 technicians to get my connection initially set up.
I had my line re-provisioned to other customers 3 times.
I ordered extra static IP addresses, the technician didn't have any of the information, nor did he have any idea what to do with that information.
SO.... I switched to Comcast Business Class, 50MBit.
The technician knew what he was doing.
Everything was set up correctly (technically speaking).
Haven't had a single issue in 6 months.
U-Verse is crap, they have no idea what they are doing.
I imagine there isn't a single carrier that offers an SLA for residential customers.
Become a business customer, however, and they'll offer an SLA - over those very same cables delivering your formerly-residential account (I know, I used to have Road Runner Business Class with the same frequent outages).
In other words, you get what you pay for. Just like you can buy a First Class ticket with all the amenities of the 'glory days' of flying; every industry is embracing (or exploring) tiers of service.
is really the only long term solution that will work (until someone discovers a super fast reliable high density wireless solution). While that is not the cause of the current outage it certainly eliminates a lot of other issues and allows you to focus on the longer term and back haul infrastructure where it should be IMO.
Beware the Lollipop of Mediocrity, Lick it once and you suck forever.
That's weird. I have Charter in Michigan and it's extremely reliable. I'd say 99.5% uptime if not more. Expensive and always trying to sell me shit I don't need (I DO NOT want VOIP, dammit!) but reliable...
My outage in Raleigh, NC is now since 3am Tuesday, going on 36+ hours.
Did receive an automated phone call telling me that my service was restored, but that proved to be incorrect.
After 30min wait on hold, I was offered a $20 credit on my account (once service was restored) for my inconvenience.
It's a shame that the area is a duopoly - TWC isn't high on my trust list after they had a multi day outage around Christmas 2012
In the entire history of the Bell System, no electromechanical central office was ever down for more than 30 minutes for any reason other than a natural disaster. Not because the components were reliable, but because the architecture was. If you design high-reliability systems, you should understand the architecture of Number 5 Crossbar.
--- anonymous uverse tech
This is whats going on, any new gateway or exisiting gateway that is restarted will not be able to obtain service. The DHCP servers are overloaded and over capacity, CMS has disabled their northbound API so no provisioning can get thru in order to lessen the load.
Its not affecting everyone in the affected areas, and as a precaution NO ONE should attempt to powercycle or reset their gateway for any reason.
I use cable for my business internet account....but picked UVerse awhile back in that compared to cable and both satellite packages with full house DVR, they were the cheapest and had by far the most HD channels for the buck.
That was a couple years ago, I guess I should shop around again to see what's out there, but so far, service and uptime has been quite good!! Even after hurricane Issac, when I get home from evac, it was up and running just fine.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Ah yes. tigerdirect.com is notorious for this. Call up, complain, get it fixed, then "We would like to offer you a free copy of x", which is actually a subscription auto-billed to your credit card. They will only take a hang up as an affirmative no. I started just paying the few bucks for newegg.com
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
years ago (10+) when you signed up for Business Class Road Runner they had a policy that you couldn't share a node (meaning that they couldn't just bill you different but it required a dedicated run). So when i moved into a new house i signed up for Business Class with no long term contract (yes it was expensive that way) but after they installed it and ran it for a month i canceled and then switched to residential. They are lazy and din't move me off the dedicated node.. so for 8 years i had residential service with business level of service.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Telecom chose Reliable (fast might be a bit of a strech) and as such had fewer outages. But the labor necessary to accomplish this and the cost (anyone remember 200+ long distance bills)? associated with this was the reason.
Telecos could afford to keep things reliable, since they had a monoploly, and a stranglehold on bandwidth. If ma bell were still around we would be paying $1,000 for a t1. Everyone likes to complain, but its something of a minor miracle that I can have almost a ds3 for $70.00/month.
Thats not to defend uverse, but its often easy to forget why the 'its not reliable as ...' Since we have 'fast, and 'cheap'.
Thomas
When I had famvid dialup in the '90s, there was a one day outage, they gave me the whole month free.
... I've been offline from UVerse for 15 days now. They're trying to fix it, but MAN this is taking forever!
I never thought in a million years that I'd say I love Comcast, but I do.
My business class connection through them has been rock solid without major issues for over two years. Other than lightning frying the modem once but they were out within hours with a replacement.
AT&T U-Verse can go pound sand as far as I'm concerned.
AT&T knows TV over DSL will never work properly, but they keep scamming the customers with that cr*ppy service.
all from a single fiber optic cable
They obviously need a 2nd fiber optic cable, now
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Rumor going around our garage is that they are running out of ip addresses. This his there California for the last 3 weeks, 2 places in the south and has spread further out. We went told what the issue was or when it was "solved", lots of finger pointing going around.
It sounds like someone blew away their DHCP lease file by mistake...so DHCP is assigning addresses that are already in use. Was there an upgrade over the weekend?
If that's the case, the only way to get around it is to query all the DSLAMs and rebuild the current lease file by hand.
Sucks to be them.
I'm wondering how they can get away with that kind of an outage for the voice service. As in, you know, not even being able to dial 911?
They built out the node about 500 feet from my house two years before even starting to offer U-verse. At that range, VDSL2+ can reach 50Mb/sec or more. I thought that could be nice. Once I saw that they seemed to care more about selling cable TV (I watch plenty with an antenna these days) and voice service (I'll stick with my reliable POTS line, TYVM), I was less interested. When I found out that they put some kind of digital certificate inside the modem where you can't just drop in another modem when yours flakes out (which I have done plenty of times with DSL), I was even less interested. (Though I will admit it may have something to do with preventing you from usurping someone else's voice connection with stored credentials.)
I've got old-school 6Mbit bridged-Ethernet DSL with fixed IP through them, and although I would like something faster and cheaper, it's solid. The only time in over 10 years that it went out was when they apparently (my best guess) bricked the remote terminal node in a botched firmware update and had to get a replacement shipped in. Every other problem lasting more than 15 minutes or so has been due to the CPE modem, and I can get replacements for $5 or so at thrift stores.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I switched to U-Verse when they had a switch-discount program, but only for about a month. The problem was that nothing worked.
I actually wrote a program to track when I was connected. In a 3 day period, I had around 200 outages, each requiring between 3-5 minutes before the connection was regained. I literally could not use it to work from home - the time required to perform the VPN connection, get back to the machine I needed to use, and get back to work was just barely shorter than the average uptime.
I reported and had techs out to fix this problem on 3 separate instances, and in each case the techs found a new problem, and blamed it on the incompetence of the previous tech. Then it would work more or less well for about an hour, before having the same problems again. Despite not being able to provide me with phone, tv, or internet service in a usable form for over a month, they refused to refund any money, and only offered to credit us for free months of their non-working service.
Switched to Time Warner who not only gave me a better deal for switching, but credited me with a free month to make up for U-Verse not doing it. Not that their random downtimes and slower-than-advertised-speeds-most-of-the-time are as well appreciated, nor their apparent throttling high-usage systems by mac address - at least in the Austin area - but at least the damn thing works.
Despite the hate for ATT corperate, they have some extremely good engineers who are either scratching there heads or totally freaking out.
Back in the early 90's when Encore launched, TCI cablevision pulled a similar stunt. This is back in the day when pay TV was controlled by signal traps on the service drops and changing programming packages required a truck roll. TCI simply added the channel to its system and told all its subscribers that the first month was free and if you don't opt out you will be charged the monthly subscription fee. To make matters worse, you also had to pay the service fee for the truck roll to add the filter.
That plan didn't go over so well and TCI got sued by the attorney generals in multiple states.
Uverse has been up for me. Power cycled. Took over 30 minutes for the connection between modem and ATT. I have a static IP so once the main connection is up and talking, all was well again.
Attorney generals: presumably multiple generals in the army of attorneys.
Attorneys general: the correct way to say what you were trying to say (more than one attorney general). The noun is made plural, not the adjective.
Out in Little Rock, Ar for more than a day now. At first I thought it had something to do with recently changing how my autodraft was done. Kindof relieved that everyone is having problems with it. Also, it sounds like they have no idea what the problem is.
I have enjoyed my uverse service and it isn't down for me. I had it at an older house too and it was fine there. My current house has fiber as well. It is expensive however.
The NSA cable switchover is causing some problems. Hold tight-- your phone, internet, and wireless communications will be 100% monitored by the NSA again very soon.
I have to return some videotapes...
I have static IPs and use that for site to site VPN to my colocation facility. I am running Cisco ASA (software 8.4) on both sides, and it took my Cisco engineer and myself two days to figure out why I can ping my servers across the tunnel but can't do anything more useful than that. Finally we tested for MTU issues which then were confirmed by discussions like this. My MTU as of 1/23 6PM ET is still somewhere in the 500 range, not to mention terrible packet loss and high latency. I just signed a contract for TW Business Class, so I am voting with my money.
I haven't had any complaints in Mississippi, and I do IT work for hundreds of clients. I also personally have U-Verse. Hmmm?
yes they should. lets just enable it on everyones bill and make the first month free.
turn an outage into a marketing strategy.
That's what DirecTV does. They give you everything but fails to tell you that you need to cancel the extras. They also tell you that unless you give them a credit card to bill directly (pun intended) they will charge you more. So unless you are aware and paying attention, they screw you out of a month or two of high dollar TV. And you need to really pay attention. Come football season you'll suddenly be charged another $60.00 / month for football coverage you didn't order. It's all a scam. There isn't an honest one out there.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
Indeed. We had a quite bad storm back in June and were without power for a week (and we were lucky to get it back so soon), but U-Verse never skipped a beat. They rolled in a swarm of generators to keep their VRAD boxes going.
Kid-proof tablet..
The two happiest days of a uverse user:
2nd happiest: the day they get it installed.
happiest: the day they get real cable.
I had uverse service for 10 days -- 9 days too long. Utter crap. The TV would not stay working, and when it did, the dolby digital would spuriously drop out. Internet? Even worse. crazy amounts of jitter -- when it worked -- which was not that often.
AT&T was unwilling to reconnect my 6 MB conventional DSL after this fiasco, so I advised them to go fuck themselves and took their wire off my house and buried it in the yard.
Comcast is expensive, expensive, but their customer service made AT&T's look bad (which is pretty remarkable.) I get 20+ MB/sec download speeds from them, regardless of how much TV is being watched.
Never again.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
The only time I thought I needed new CPE gear with U-Verse, I had a technician at my house within a couple of hours with a new box. Late. On a Saturday.
And then it turned out to be a cabling issue a few hundred feet out, which he fixed.
Having spare gear on-hand is nice and all, but if it means having 6Mbit DSL instead of 12 or 18Mbit VDSL, I'll take the latter.
And if it breaks for some reason, I can always tether my phone, or use "Linksys" or "NETGEAR" in the interim.
*shrug*
Kid-proof tablet..
Ah yes. tigerdirect.com is notorious for this. Call up, complain, get it fixed, then "We would like to offer you a free copy of x", which is actually a subscription auto-billed to your credit card. They will only take a hang up as an affirmative no. I started just paying the few bucks for newegg.com
This is why you dont accept free shit instead of having them fix your problem.
I used to have a housemate who had a constant problem with the handset Optus (Australian Telco) sold to her. She was on Pre-Paid (Pay As You Go) so she paid for the handset outright. Every month she'd ring up and complain, every month they'd offer her $10 credit to get her off the phone and every month I'd ask "but did they fix your problem". She didn't get it and continued to get constant call disconnections.
Companies offer free shit because it's easier than fixing the problem. When you take the free shit, you give them a free pass not to fix the problem.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I switched to ATT uVerse 2 months ago. In those 2 months I have constant installation/product problems. ... the Taps were 36 inches apart and both time required a 3ft by 8 ft ditch to be dug up. ... inside the house ... died and had to be replaced.
2 different Taps were found two weeks apart
My NID (the outside the house box) has been replaced once
My backup battery
My Access Point/Wireless router inside the house - even before this outage - started to lose both the "broadband" and "service" LEDs every morning
and to bring it back online with the outside NID (the dsl modem) I had reboot the battery by pressing into the Red PinHole on the left of the battery.
They still can't explain the online/offline problem after maybe 5-6 diff tech visits.
Now this 3 day total outage that according to ATT and to the Techs I talk to is more or less Nationwide.
How can they call themselves a Service Provider ??? They have the Battery Backup so in the case of power outages you can still make phone calls... but with this outage there is NO service - Voice/Video/Data ... all out.
I wonder how many 911 call attempts have been tried and failed. How many people have to die from a Heart Attack, gunshot, fire?
Cell Phone doesn't have 911 location ability yet for most carriers. So if you've been in a bad car accident ... you better know where to tell the 911 operator your location to get the ambulance there !!
I'm absolutely amazed this hasn't been on CNN yet...
Y'know normally I'd say that's a slimy maneuver, and recoil in disgust.
But reading it the second time I caught the Road Runner mention and reflexively did a fist pump.
Glad no one was in the room to see it except my dog.
But it's ok because he hates Time Warner more than I do.
After having their service for two years and constantly seeing an increase in my bill over the years, I finally decided to return to Comcast...Comcast has their problems but unreliability isn't one of them....
I'm so honored! 48 hours offline in suburban Atlanta.
Wait? How am I posting?? Thanks to a good old Verizon wifi hotspot my employer gave me!
Verizon or AT&T? Who shall I choose next.
p.s. I'd call to cancel my Uverse, but I can't get through!
San Antonio tx- my uverse Internet still out. The automated man keeps telling me to reboot my computer but I'm beginning to doubt his technical skills.....
Actually, according to Miriam-Webster, either attorneys general OR attorney generals is the acceptable plurality.
The noun can be considered both words together in this case.
I used to have a housemate who had a constant problem with the handset Optus (Australian Telco) sold to her. She was on Pre-Paid (Pay As You Go) so she paid for the handset outright. Every month she'd ring up and complain, every month they'd offer her $10 credit to get her off the phone and every month I'd ask "but did they fix your problem". She didn't get it and continued to get constant call disconnections.
Companies offer free shit because it's easier than fixing the problem. When you take the free shit, you give them a free pass not to fix the problem.
The other side of the coin is that there are plenty of people who call to complain, but don't really want the "issue" fixed, because they don't actually consider it to be all that serious of a problem. They'd rather just use it as leverage to get free shit.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
ATT advertises bundles starting at $59 a month on its website, stating, “U-verse delivers television, phone and Internet services — all from a single fiber optic cable at the speed of light.
On what planet? Because here on Earth they use phone lines and DSL for everything. I wouldn't be surprised if AT&T hasn't laid 1 foot of fiber anywhere in the US. That's what Time Warner does, not them.
The other side of the coin is that there are plenty of people who call to complain, but don't really want the "issue" fixed, because they don't actually consider it to be all that serious of a problem. They'd rather just use it as leverage to get free shit.
Sounds like a win-win for the companies.
I am asking all to copy and paste the following and email your congress person.
Dear Mr Congressman, I am respectfully requesting you to look into the service outage of AT&T U-verse from 1/21/2013 to 1/24/2013. The fact of the matter is that during the outage no one affected had the ability to call 911 if warranted. This should make it mandatory for AT&T to report the true number of customers affected. It is my opinion that AT&T is underestimating the number of customers affected. Also the fact that AT&T was not putting out timely information as to the problem or a time table for repairs.
Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2013/01/24/2602689/atts-u-verse-outage-leaves-thousands.html#storylink=cpy
Why would you ever order from tigerdirect instead of new egg in the first place?!?! Lol
According to statements made to CNN by an AT&T spokesperson, the outage was caused by "a software upgrade".
She went on to say the outage "only hit a limited number of customers". Well DUH! If 1 customer is still online and 99.99% of your customers have an outage, thats still a limited number of customers. I love how corporations have these spindoctors who make vague, noncomittal statements that really provide no information.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/24/tech/web/uverse-outage-att/
I had a commercial Road Runner account while living in an apartment back when T1 lines were the big business lines at around $2000 a month. I was paying more like $150 a month for guaranteed 1Meg/768K. Like your setup at that time the node wasn't shared and I had the only commercial connection in the complex. If a site I was connected to supported it my download speed was limited to the 10Meg port on my router.... :)
You should be more careful about writing things and try to make them more factual. If Directv give you something and never told you that you had to pay for extras, then when they charge you for extras, you simply call them up and tell them to explain why you're being billed for something they never disclosed to you. When they can't, demand they remove the charge and if they don't, take them to small claims court and get the judge to remove it for them. To me it sounds like what you're actually saying is directv gave you a 20 page contract which you signed without reading, and you're now upset with them for acting exactly how they said they would in the contract that you didn't read. In this case, this is not a scam, it's a failure to read and understand how contracts and the legal system work.
You just described me. If there is a way to get free shit in exchange for spending 30 minutes on the phone complaining, sign me up for it.