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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.
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?
Mine is working fine. Sucks to be y 998kjhkh CARRIER LOST
Place nail here >+
Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Alabama and Oklahoma are cited across multiple sources, including http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/90315/att-u-verse-experiencing-widespread-outages . I couldn't find any other sources that mentioned three more states, but eyeballing a map of the US, and how some mentioned the 'southwest' too, I suspect Arizona and New Mexico may be involved as well.
Not a complete list, but its limited to more southern states. FTA:
"Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Alabama and Oklahoma."
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
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.
According to ArkansasBusiness.com: "Customers have also flooded AT&T's Facebook page community support forums to report their outages, with complaints hailing from states including Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Alabama and Oklahoma. A number of them said they had experienced U-verse outages since Monday. Many of these customers have reported that the restart fix suggested by U-verse support was not working."
Karma: Bad
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.
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
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.
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.'
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...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Maybe, but then people are going to point out that services like Verzion FiOS are more reliable, faster, and cheaper. Municipal Broadband efforts tend to be even better than that. This is more about AT&T being greedy and incompetent.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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
In other words, the SBC and Bell South states. (The current lowercase "at&t" is SBC renamed after buying out what was left of the original uppercase "AT&T".) On the other hand, I've got the impression that those are most of the states in which U-verse is even offered.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, Alabama and Oklahoma
Is it just me or has the internet seemed a little smarter on average for the last few days...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Their TV-over-DSL has worked great for us for the last five years. It's their ToS that sucks.
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; }
Here's all the areas being affected, posting anon since I work for them, and I'm not entirely sure I'm allowed to post this info.
Atlanta (Tucker), GA
Baton Rouge, LA
Birmingham, AL
Charleston, SC
Charlotte, NC
Columbia, SC
Fayetteville, AR
Greensboro, NC
Greenville, SC
Jackson, MS
Jacksonville, FL
Knoxville, TN
Little Rock, AR
Louisville, KY
Memphis, TN
Miami, FL
Mobile, AL
Nashville, TN
New Orleans, LA
Oklahoma City, OK
Orlando (Daytona Beach), FL
Raleigh, NC
Tulsa, OK
West Palm Beach, FL
These areas should be resolved by now:
Austin, TX
Corpus Christi, TX
Dallas (Richardson), TX
El Paso, TX
Houston, TX
Lubbock, TX
Odessa (Midland), TX
San Antonio, TX
Here's what I know about it as a lowly peon in the company: The DHCP daemon on a server in Richardson, TX, can't handle all the DHCP requests, and so keeps restarting every 10 minutes. When it's up, requests go through fine.
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.
you think that is bad, I had just converted my service to U-verse from a old style ATT dsl acct, and this outage hit the day it was suppose to switch over and be active.
so much for un-interrupted service.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Most cablebox DVRs do that as well - they check to make sure you're subscribed to cable first before playing back recorded content. I would guess satellite ones are the same too (except TiVo).
Third party DVRs like TiVo, Myth, and Windows Media Center, obviously don't have this restriction.
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...
From what I've gathered from various sources, the specific problem is that the server used to authenticate the RG to U-verse is borked. So... as long as your RG was authenticated PRIOR to the outage, your service should keep working. HOWEVER, if you lose power (or something else happens that requires it to re-authenticate), your service will go bye-bye too until they get the problem fixed.
Right now, I'm hoping that authentication isn't required for DHCP renewal... because if it is, those of us who had service this morning probably have close to 50-50 odds of NOT having service tonight (or tomorrow morning... odds assume 1-week DHCP lease).
All I can say is, if my service goes down & I get a nastygram from AT&T for tethering, I'll be seriously torn between:
a) challenging them to just TRY and decrypt my VPN traffic to prove it, or
b) telling them to fuck off, and demanding a free gigabyte of overage data per week (or fraction thereof) until my service gets restored... unless they want to risk losing a customer with TV (U300), internet (24/3), VoIP (unlimited), AND mobile phone (Android450 w/3gb data and unlimited text/mobile2mobile) service.
Clever, but can't work with U-Verse: The supplied "Home Gateway" (VDSL modem and router combo-box) is sufficiently locked-down to preclude any such tinkering. The WAN address (and gateway, and, and, and) comes from DHCP, period, address if there is no DHCP response then it defaults to 0.0.0.0.
In this state it cannot route packets, since it has no valid default route, and it stays broken until DHCP gets un-borked.
Furthermore, the only modems that work with U-Verse are those supplied by AT&T, so there's no chance of using third-party gear to work around the issue.
(That all said: What the fuck, AT&T? 15 states all relying on one box? I've been bitched out here on Slashdot for running a singular mail server with no diverse redundancy for a small company, while you've got fuckloads of paying customers relying on one machine?)
Kid-proof tablet..
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 $60.00 / month for football coverage you didn't order. It's all a scam. There isn't an honest one out there.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
If this is really true and it is a single DHCP server handling requests from this huge geographical area then they get the ISP Darwin Award IMO. That said not to call you a liar or anything but I can't see something like this causing a 3 day outage. It's just not that hard to fix this kind of problem.
It may not have been the installer's fault. I've seen "outdoor rated" cable fail similarly: I have behind me a multi-$k box which was ruined by some allegedly high-quality, white-jacketed Belden RG6 with "Outdoor" printed on the jacket. After a couple of years of exposure on a rooftop, the jacket turned brittle, cracked, and started turning into dust.
Which was, you know, pretty surprising to find: I have the rational expectation that when I pay extra for wire that says Belden on it that it will perform as advertised.
(Lesson learned: Always use black wire outdoors, as the pigmentation alone helps stop UV from reaching so deep, so quickly.)
Kid-proof tablet..
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..
Yeah but you're S.L.O.W.
;-)
And your downloads take a long time too!
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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.
Doesn't matter if most DVRs do it, it still sucks. A couple years ago I lost my cable on a thursday, this is when I realized I couldn't watch recorded shows when cable is down). A tech was out friday, spent 10 minutes outside somewhere, my cable worked again. Tech left, 10 minutes later my cable died again. Called em up, as monday was a holiday nobody could come out until next tuesday.
IMHO, this is bovine manure. It's not my fault the cable went out, nor that the first guy didn't fix it right. I'm paying, I have plenty of stuff recorded, let me watch my danged shows.
That said, I've been pretty happy with my Uverse. Had Cox when I first moved here, their DVR sucked so hard I returned it after 6 weeks. My ex-wife's Tivo died so she got Time Warner DVR. She lasted 2 weeks before getting Uverse. She's happy with it.
I had DSL from SBC in the early '90s. It worked fine. Unauthenticated DHCP addressing. I moved. New place went out 3-5 days a week. Also required PPPoE before that was commonly available in home routers, so they gave PPPoE software and directions on Windows connection sharing. After months of complaining about the service and such, I got nothing. Then one letter to the FCC (copying the regulatory body and 3 departments of SBC) I had the service fixed within 48 hours of sending the letter (probably before the FCC even received it, certainly before anyone there read it). The dodgey PPPoE software coupled with the bad line made the service unusable, they only needed to fix one and couldn't get that done in 6 months, but fixed both in a day when they decided to do it.
Learn to love Alaska
Business service here in Baton Rouge, LA working just fine as far as I can see no outages in my logs.
All the what were Bell South States, the geode sits in Jacksonville and most of the hardware was in Atlanta. Texas of course was originally SBC.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
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.
Your bad experience wasn't typical, but probably IS common for people who are in neighborhoods with old wiring that are more than ~1,000 feet away from the VRAD. They SHOULD have tried swapping you to a different pair, swapping your line card at the VRAD, and (if all else failed) bonded two pairs so that each pair carried only half the data. VDSL2 in a neighborhood with old wires isn't plug & play, but it's rare for AT&T to be unable to eventually get someone who's within ~1,500 feet to work reliably. Or at least it WAS, before its senior management clamped down and restricted what they could do to make a line work before AT&T just wrote you off and decided you weren't profitable enough to bother with.
In neighborhoods where AT&T went to the trouble of laying brand new cables (like mine), it works quite well. According to the benchmarks the lineman ran on my line, it has plenty of headroom to take me up to ~50mbps without breaking a sweat, and maybe 60mbps with more aggressive forward error correction and interleaving.
Of course, you can (like I did) question the sanity of burying brand new bundles of cat3 copper instead of... well... fiber... My guess is that AT&T had a shitload of copper cable on spools in warehouses that they already bought & accounted for in some past fiscal year, but would have had to pay for new fiber now, so under the slightly fucked up way American businesses work, it was "cheaper" for them to bury brand new expensive copper (the break-even point is basically 6 pairs... more than that, and fiber is actually cheaper per foot because copper is so expensive now) that's technically "free" (because they already counted it against some past quarter's profits) than it would have been to buy new cheap fiber and bury it instead.
Of course, they'll probably have to dig it up and bury fiber in 10-20 years anyway, but they can't see past the next quarter's profits, and by the time AT&T's stock price crashes because they've ceased to be competitive against everyone else, its current senior management will have wrung the company's equity dry, cashed out their stock options, & sold the shares anyway. It's the American Way(tm). You know, freedom from evil socialistic municipal fiber, liberty, patriots, guns, Jesus, and shit like that...
The south shall rise again!
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.
Racist? Seriously?
It's a tongue in cheek slam on the luddite South...which is majority WHITE.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
You insensitive clod, I'm in Texas
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
Well bless your heart...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
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've got the impression that those are most of the states in which U-verse is even offered.
Here in So Cal, U-verse is available in my apartment complex, but only in two of the seven buildings. Go figure. I use Charter, the lesser of two evils.
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.
Ok, so the big question is WTF is AT&T doing with ONE dhcp server for the entire u-verse network, but the bigger question is WHY haven't they just spun up another one to replace it? How long does it take to install an OS, install a DHCP daemon and configure some scopes? A few hours? A day at most?
Actually not, I'm happy to include all races in my fun making of the South.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Then they installed it incorrectly. If you create a drip loop and caulk the cable entering the building where it should point downward, this should keep water out.
Get with the program. Executives can't get funding for their bonuses if the company is going to spend money on actual infrastructure.
There was this article that stated that AT&T's infrastructure expenditure has been flat for the past few years while rates have risen. I suppose running on one DHCP server is one way to save money.
Meh.
Yes, my rates have gone up (though not appreciably) with AT&T over the past few years.
But having folks rely on one single point of failure in a system of this scale is a problem that is easily and cheaply corrected, and this is something that should be well-known within companies such as AT&T whose whole business model has always revolved around providing and maintaining reliable infrastructure.
(And by "cheap," I mean a few thousand dollars in hardware and a crew to implement and test it. Total expense: Far less than a singular VRAD cabinet that can only serve a few hundred customers. Servicing DHCP requests against a database is not exactly the most demanding thing in the world, and there's no reason (especially money!) to support having such a failure point.)
Kid-proof tablet..
Reading comprehension fail.
Water can travel -through- cables. And as reported by OP, this is exactly what happened. I, myself, cast no doubt upon his observations.
A drip loop does not, and cannot, prevent the transfer of fluid inside of a cable jacket by wicking, capillary action, or by dissimilar temperatures and pressures.
A drip loop is formed to shed water that is external to the cable jacket: Water traveling along the outside of the jacket tends to fall off, due to gravity, upon encountering a drip loop. In a perfect world, it works fine.
But gravity does not keep a candle from burning, nor does it prevent you from swallowing while upside-down. (Also: Heat pipes, and so on.)
Once the water is inside of the cable jacket (because it is cracked and split), it can do other things that neither a drip loop (nor caulk; WTF?) can prevent.
(In other news: The underground conduit is full of water. It is flooded simply because it eventually must be unless extraordinary measures are taken. It doesn't matter which conduit it is; it's safer to assume that it is full of water than to assume otherwise, despite the best intentions and practices...which is also why direct-burial cable tends to be flooded with mineral oil that displaces air, such that the air cannot be displaced by water because it does not exist.)
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The sad thing is, they probably stopped routing your DSL connection all the way to the central office, but connected it at the same sidewalk DSLAM box that your U-verse connects at. You've had a "classic" DSL connection that could achieve U-verse speeds, which they just wouldn't give it to you unless you paid for the conversion.
What's wrong with caulk? Siliconized caulk works for me.
I do admit if the jacket has been compromised it would be a problem only I don't have any experience with damage like the OP talked about. Why would service entrance cables last many years without significant trouble? I'm also curious if black performs better, why is direct bury and UV resistant PVC conduit gray?
Siliconized caulk only sticks well to clean, dry surfaces. And because it cures (and/or dries, depending on the exact nature of the particular product), it has little tolerance for being disturbed: Once an outside force peels it free, it cannot ever be pushed back into place with any semblance of a seal.
It's also a pain to deal with: It tends to ruin cloth, it cures in the tube, it sticks to tools, it sucks to get it on your hands, etc. And when it does adhere well long-term, it's a shitty job to try to remove it.
I like Panduit's incarnation of Duct Seal for most penetrations. It doesn't cure or dry, and can be worked back into shape years later if an outside force requires it. I also use Coax Seal for some stuff, and sometimes butyl rubber in a moldable sheet form (as sold to the satellite TV industry for roof penetrations).
But RTV silicone? I use that in exactly one wiring application: Penetrations through the roofs of new cop cars. And the only reason I use it there is because of its chemical resistance, and because I have new surfaces to work with, and because Permatex sells it in black. (If any of these variables were different, I'd be using something else.)
As to PVC conduit: I shouldn't have to say this, but a schedule 40 pipe is a good bit thicker than the average cable jacket. And it does degrade as the outside of it tends to turn powdery and white. So why is it grey instead of black? I'd guess for the same reason that buried plastic natural gas line is orange: It has always been done that way, and so it continues to be done that way.
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That's interesting about the Panduit product. Are you referring to this?
http://www.panduit.com/wcs/Satellite?c=Page&childpagename=Panduit_Global%2FPG_Layout&cid=1345565612156&packedargs=classification_id%3D311%26locale%3Den_us&pagename=PG_Wrapper
http://www.drillspot.com/products/678579/panduit_ds5_duct_seal_compound?s=1&catargetid=1623454804&gclid=CKzVgYq7hbUCFciDQgodhnUA5g
and this is Coax Seal?
http://coaxseal.com/product-informatio http://www.amazon.com/protects-types-cable-moisture-corrosion/dp/B0002ZPINC
I just looked at my NID installation and just noticed the riser cable is actually exposed outside of the house for around 1 foot before entering the building. The seal used is some sort of paintable silicone. So I need to get some of these products or some sort of UV-stable tubing to protect the homerun. Do you have any experience with Tygon R-3400 tubing? http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/item.aspx?itemid=23409&catid=864
Thanks for all the info!
Yep, that's the Panduit stuff. There's other brands of it, too, but that's the one I'm most familiar with. I would be unsurprised if other "Duct Seal" products were exactly the same.
And that's the correct Coax Seal. It does a somewhat better job than duct seal at sticking to jackets, but it tends to cost more and I can't get it locally (unlike Panduit stuff), so I use it more sparingly.
No idea on a link for butyl rubber -- I got a good amount of it from a DirecTV installer several years ago when he cleaned out his truck on his last day of work and haven't needed more. ;)
The tubing you found looks fine (and US Plastics is just down the road from me, though please be aware that the company is owned by God).
But if it were me and I wanted to wrap it in some manner of tube I'd just use 1/2" flexible nonmetallic PVC conduit. It's normally sold as "Sealtite," and you can buy it by the foot at just about any hardware/electrical/home store.
It's grey, and it does slowly rot despite being specified for outdoor use, but it's one of those things where the thickness of the material is such that it probably doesn't matter in our lifetimes. And it's UL listed for such applications, so if your house ever burns down the insurance guy can't point at it and go "See what you've done! NOW YOU'RE HOMELESS!"
Besides, you can always paint it...for that matter, you can paint the bare jacket with outdoor latex paint and keep much of the UV out and probably prolong its existence quite long enough.
Or (cheapest, perhaps even easiest and best): Since you don't have much length to bother with just give it two wraps of black 3M Super 33+ electrical tape and call it a day. It's the correct material for protecting outdoor aerial splices that are done with cohesive rubber tape, and is the final layer supplied with many underground telco splice kits, and it does not rot (ever, as far as I can tell) in sunlight..
(Why two wraps? Dunno. But IIRC 3M's instructions say to use two wraps, in opposite directions, oriented so that the final wrap tends to shed water instead of collect it...)
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(Oh. And for the uninitiated: Super 33+ is available everywhere, including Wal-Mart. And as far as I'm concerned, it's the only electrical tape that is worth buying, ever, even though its quite expensive compared to the other stuff on the shelf next to it. Even if I'm going through rolls and rolls of the stuff pulling wires, just to throw the tape away when I'm done, it's all I want to use. Accept no substitutes.)
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I appreciate the time you've spent explaining all these alternatives. As for wrapping in 2 directions, this YouTube video shows how to protect a splice using 3M products. They recommend 4 layers of half-lapping to protect the mastic tape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tsx6im7qng
I can't remember what brand but I think it was 3M. I had an old roll of electrical tape and it was old enough that the vinyl separated from the adhesive when I attempted to use it. Maybe it wasn't the model you recommended. I gave up after trying to unroll around a foot trying to find if the adhesive would fix itself.