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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?
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.
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.
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... --
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
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.
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..
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..
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.