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Outage Knocks Out All Major Phone Providers On the East Coast (dailydot.com)
Every major phone carrier experience outages on United States' east coast this morning at around 11am local time. The outage lasted for about 45 minutes. DownDetector, which monitors outages of services, confirmed AT&T, Verizon, Charter Spectrum, Comcast, Sprint, Time Warner Cable, US Cellular, and Vonage among others were affected. From a DailyDot report: T-Mobile CEO John Legere tweeted about the incident, pointing to issues with Level 3, a major internet backbone. Other tech firms quickly pointed to a Level 3 outage as well. No specific information has been released on potential causes of the outage or consequences that may result from it. Business VoIP providers (Resource: https://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/VOIP+Service+Providers+Business) were unaffected as they run over internet connections.
The really should think of some sort of system of interconnected networks that is so redundant and widespread that even a nuclear war couldn't take out!
I'm on the East Coast and didn't notice any outage. Are we sure it was the entire East coast?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
W9ABC this is K6XYZ, over ....
(no answer)
W9ABC this is K6XYZ, over
no answer
Dial up on cell.
"Hey, Harry, turn on your damned radio!"
"OK"
W9ABC, this is K6XYZ, over
K6XYZ this is W6ABC, I hear you 5 by 5 now!
Lesson: This is a fine example of communications redundancy ... errrr ...
Once you get to an L3 switch, it doesn't matter if it's a POTS line or not, it's just a phone call.. Heck, when you hop off the MSC on a cell, it's just a phone call... The only possible advantage a POTS line might have in this situation is you don't have all the HLR/VLR signaling when you are roaming outside of your home MSC, so you might actually get a dial tone and be able to make local to the exchange calls...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
What Al Gore actually said was "I took the initiative in creating the internet". In context his statement is true. No, he did not invent the internet. But he was the first politician to recognize that interconnecting computers could have benefits far beyond improvements in science. He realized that the network should opened up to everyone. As far back as the 1970's Gore was involved in legislation involving technology and he worked tirelessly to educate other politicians about technology. He wrote bills that funded research in robotics, magnetic leviation, biotech, image recognition, speech recognition just to name a few. He wrote the bill that funded Mosaic and also wrote the bill that essentially privatized the Internet.
If you want to know more about how Gore "invented the internet" take the initiative and find a book. It's a fascinating story.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Hmmm. Major Internet outage reported the day after source code for enormous DDoS attacks is released.
This is why I maintain my license, mobile gear and some semblance of emergency power. I'm hardly ever on the air these days (was way more active when I had a long commute and used to travel a lot) but if the proverbial shit hits the fan I'll be able to do something.
of receiving emails from people telling you that they can't communicate with you.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I just have to laugh some times when I see my fellow hamateurs spout off about how much ham radio helps. When your little Baofeng 1/2 Watt portable can't hit the repeater because it has no electrical power then there won't be much you can do.
First of all, lots of repeaters are provisioned with backup power. Not all of them, but enough to serve in a pinch. Next, not all of us have only a 500 mw HT at our disposal. A 4-5 watt 2-meter transceiver, with the right antenna, can reach a very long way. We're making note of you and will make sure that you go to the back of the line when your iPhone has been off-line for 10 days or so.
I just have to laugh some times when I see my fellow hamateurs spout off about how much ham radio helps. When your little Baofeng 1/2 Watt portable can't hit the repeater because it has no electrical power then there won't be much you can do.
I know of at least two repeaters which have battery backup (one which I help maintain) and I'm sure there are plenty more within the range of my Baofeng with spare batteries and the large mobile antenna I can hook up to. Then there is the mobile rig in the car, that's good for as long as I have gasoline to keep the battery charged. The repeater I help to maintain has an on site contingency plan to provide power from a portable generator should the need arise from an extended power outage so it could be on the air for days. SOME of us have plans for such things...
Heck, some of us even practice these plans doing that yearly contest called "Field Day" perhaps you've heard of it?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
OK networking is designed to be routable and redundant. ...
Now if all traffic must pass through a fort that used to have no signs
or a bit of Utah so hot and far from anyplace that only Octopussy could
think of
In all fairness for phones to go down because an Internet backbone failed
tells me that all our phone company laws need revision at all levels.
At one time a POT had obligations of reliability and redundancy that
seem to have flipped to a binary work or is broken.
I recall mothers day calls where you got all signals busy because of
the surge. At least the management was not Uber imposing hidden
surge pricing.
This is an opportunity for good questions at the VP thing tonight.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
So in other words, Al Gore funded the internet.
As I understand it, what he did was sponsor legislation to open the Internet / ARPANet, to general use, including commercial use, removing the limitations on who could connect and what they could say. Prior to that the connections and traffic had to have some connection to education, the military, or dealings with them.
So on one hand he helped give the general Internet a great boost, enabling it to become the public utility we know, love, and use.
But on the other hand he effectively legalized Spam, because going from very limited business uses to any business use is OK took away the main tool for suppressing unsolicited commercial email and network newsgroup postings.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... these days to some company else? Gone are the days when any kind of service was provided by just one company, who was then undoubtly responsible for however good or bad a service was. Today, there is an endless chain of suppliers, sub-contractors, infrastructure providers, whom to assign blame to, so ultimately no one feels responsible, everybody has an excuse, and whatever SLA exists, it's not worth the paper it's written on.
The US POTS network was also a robust way to contact a lot of vital and important people.
If a second shift or experts where needed on site due to an event, often a second POTS service would be installed and kept in good working condition.
No need to worry about a new phone been "on" or "off", local power. Unless the phone line did not work, that phone was expected to ring under most conditions.
In theory the back end to such a POTS into the wider network would have been well looked after and robust in most states.
The change to optical, cell towers with battery only power lasting hours, a lack of gas or other looked after on site power to take over.
Crews finding they have to totally rebuild, repair or replace network power during a longer loss of power rather than just to ensure backup power keeps working.
The other issues is the network design. Lots of long shared "pipe" as the network, with no other ready networks to change to. One always working pipe is the network from telco, network to telco to user. Redundancy is now reduced to a crew an hour or further away in the "state" on standby to fix the one and only big connection.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"