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."

Comments

Re:They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up

[Anonymous Coward]

yes they should. lets just enable it on everyones bill and make the first month free.

turn an outage into a marketing strategy.

Re:They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up

[firex726]

Does AT&T even offer an SLA for it's residential customers?

Re:This is surprising

[the eric conspiracy]

Obviously you have never owned an Italian car. Speed in some models, but never reliability. Ever.

Re:They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up

[Bodero]

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.

It worked better with relays

[Animats]

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.

Re:It worked better with relays

[Anonymous Coward]

I see you're not a geezer, son. It's obvious all you know about the AT&T monopoly is what you read and nothing more. When they broke up Ma Bell, there were only landlines. Not even answering machines. Service was $12.00 a month for local calls only, back when gasoline was thirty cents a gallon and a burger, fries, and coke at McDonalds was forty seven cents. That equates to over $120 a month in today's money, for local phone calls only. And you had to rent the phone from them. And long distance was incredibly expensive. You might want to check out Lilly Tomlin's "Ernestine" on YouTube, it was funny because it was true.

Bell Labs never went away. There are many replacements for Western Electric. We lost nothing and gained much. There was absolutely no downside whatever from AT&T's breakup. There is no upside to any monopoly, from a customer's point of view.

Re:They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up

[TheRealMindChild]

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

Re:My over-reaction

[SoCalChris]

My parents have U-verse at their house, and had a similar experience. It took almost 6 months before the service could even be considered near reliable. Even still, they only get about half of their advertised speed, but it's still the best option where they live. And they don't live out in the boonies, they live on the LA/Orange county border, in a city of over 100k people. I however, DO live out in the boonies (Comparitavely speaking), and have Verizon FIOS with a 150/75Mbit connection, that is consistently the speed that was advertised, and costs less than their U-verse.

My parents recently had an interesting problem with their service. They kept finding little pools of water near the switch that the U-verse technician installed in their bedroom, with the switch fried. After technicians had replaced their second or third switch, they finally decided to look into what was causing the problem. When the technician ran the original wire (Which went outside of their house), he didn't use outdoor rated cable. After about a year in the sun, it had developed little cracks in the cable jacket, and capillary action was running water from the cracks all the way to the switch.

Re:They should give people 1mo free HBO to make up

[Amouth]

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.

Re:Whole home party!

[Mister Transistor]

I'm guessing probably not.

I have U-Verse, and they do a real chickenshit maneuver with the DVR, in that somehow it phones home before it will play any of YOUR LOCAL RECORDED CONTENT. This sucks, I assume it's to make sure you're not a deadbeat before it will play or do anything else but if your internet is out, for whatever reason, you can't even watch your locally recorded shows to fill time until the service returns.

Did I say that sucks?

FWIW my service in IL is unaffected, for now, anyway...