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

This is surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:This is surprising

[MickyTheIdiot]

Reliable and speed... ...in the CEO's latest Italian car.

Re:This is surprising

[Andy Dodd]

Obviously the CEO is using reliability via redundancy. If he has 10 fast Italian cars, he's got a decent chance that at least one works at any given time.

Re:This is surprising

[mjwx]

Obviously the CEO is using reliability via redundancy. If he has 10 fast Italian cars, he's got a decent chance that at least one works at any given time.

Redundant Array of Expensive Ferrari's?

How would that work if it broke down whilst he was driving? will he need to tow the other 9 Ferrari's to ensure that he has the ability to failover at any time?

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:Which states?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Which states?

[Huggs]

http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article/90315/att-u-verse-experiencing-widespread-outages
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."

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

[microcars]

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.

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

[Waffle Iron]

You've got some real rose-colored glasses there. I remember what else came along with that monopoly reliability:

-Phones, which you had to rent for decades, wired directly to the wall with no connectors. (That made painting a room into a constant phone shuffle.)
-Rules against hooking anything but rented telco equipment to the system.
-Astronomical per-minute costs to dial up grandma in the next state.
-Switches that were frequently overloaded by too much traffic (fast busy signal). Not technically "down", but frequently unuseable anyway.
-Zero calling features.

If the AT&T monopoly were still in place, we'd probably never have gotten internet access at all. Instead, we'd be probably all be stuck using clunky telco-owned terminals like the French Minitel system.

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.

INFORMATION

[Anonymous Coward]

--- 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.

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: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...

Re:Which states?

[pixelpusher220]

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...

Re:Which states?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Which states?

[adolf]

Cox used to have DHCP issues. I just ran ipconfig, got the info from my old IP and typed it in as a static IP. Problem solved

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?)